[ecshafer]

AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely using ai to assess the submissions and are not using any common sense by blindly accepting the results.

[jagged-chisel]

I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.

[nz]

With the exception of _one_ company that I worked at, pretty much every[0] company was a struggle between engineering and management. Engineering wants to get the software correct, and management wants to fire-hose features into the market. Most of the time (so more than half, at least), management tends to have a compulsion to mindlessly imitate what other companies/competitors are doing, usually without prioritization (so even if feature-parity is a good idea, usually management will want to prioritize whatever the newest feature is, and to put existing work on the back-burner). It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.

[0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.

[Zigurd]

One of my first gigs as a consultant was to write a project management system for a company that didn't really need a custom project management system. The CEO pulled me aside and told me the only important feature of the project management system was that you couldn't assign the same priority to two features. I would be blamed for making such a crappy project management system, but that's what I was there for. Once I was done, I was told to make myself hard to schedule and expensive.

[ecshafer]

> the only important feature of the project management system was that you couldn't assign the same priority to two feature

That is a good idea for a project management system. Force ranking of priorities.

[customguy]

Even better is when you can only assign a priority once, ever. So if one thing was marked "urgent", nothing else can ever be "urgent" again. It can be "Urgent" or "double urgent" or "urgent for real this time", but not "urgent". Forces creativity and maybe even, depending on the size and business (as in "being busy") of the organization, the creation of whole new words after all existing permutations have been used, from which we all benefit.

[DoctorOetker]

For a novel problem (sub)domain that is great, if no prior optimization occurred globally dominant bottlenecks / inefficiencies still exist.

But once the worst bottleneck is widened to the same width as the second-worst bottleneck, you are from then on optimizing both until you reach the width of the third-worst bottleneck, and from then on you need to elevate all 3 to improve the situation, and so on.

to make it more concrete with an example:

you can identify that the friction on a bicycle comes predominantly from the front wheel, so you optimize the front wheel bearing/lubrication/... until you discover the front wheel has the same friction as the rear wheel bearings, so if you want to improve you'd have to improve both front and rear wheel friction, which helps until they have improved beyond the friction on the pedal bearings, from then on you need to improve all 3, until you discover the chain links became the friction bottleneck, etc...

[Timon3]

I could see this working as long as it applies per-level & only takes into account direct siblings, e.g. every epic must have a unique priority, and every feature belonging to that epic must have a unique priority, etc.

[homeonthemtn]

Unless you can change the rankings. Then... Then it gets dumb real fast

[ben_w]

> It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.

My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".

Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.

* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.

[rcxdude]

One piece of managment advice I've gotten is to be very careful about what ideas you're throwing out there, because people can very easily get the wrong idea about the priority, and this can get worse as multiple layers get involved.

[datsci_est_2015]

Well people assume that as you move up the chain of command, the ratio of noise to signal drops precipitously. If your CEO is focusing on idle musings then I would fear that you’re directionless. But in reality no one person can be laser focused for 24 hours a day, including the 5 minutes you happen to spend with someone talking about something you just read while in the elevator.

[inigyou]

Decision trees are one of the oldest forms of AI! There are even algorithms to automatically form decision trees, though you don't need ML to have AI.

[ben_w]

Indeed; As I recall, I mentioned GOFAI in the interview and got amused agreement.

[erikerikson]

Those algorithms were only called machine learning and it's the opposite. Before the marketers got ahold of it we reserved AI for the actually intelligent, sentient, full strength vision of intelligent systems. We now talk about general AIs and A[Super]Is.

[rrvsh]

That's not true. AI was widely used to refer to the decision systems and state machines that produced NPC behaviour in video games, and I'm sure many other things than just science fiction

[kyle-rb]

The term AGI was coined almost 30 years ago; is that when the marketers got ahold of it?

[inigyou]

It's all different forms of monkeystatus games. Humans, like other primates, have an area of the brain which monitors how dominant they are within the pack. Capitalism is all about this brain area. Despite beliefs, it has nothing to do with merit.

[anal_reactor]

To be the devil's advocate, engineers themselves can be hilariously incompetent too. Engineers have a tendency of assuming that budget is infinite and target audience is other engineers from same specialization. Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account. At some point my manager, who himself used to be an engineer, told me with straight face to convince the rest of the engineering department to drop everything and join his newest pet project despite zero potential of any business outcomes.

[thwarted]

> Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.

How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".

[anal_reactor]

The problem is that more convenient corporate-owned options take over, become the standard, and then the cost of running free software skyrockets. Nobody in my friend group uses Signal. I haven't met a single person IRL who has a smartphone that isn't running on either Android or iOS. The fact that not everyone looks at me like I'm taking crazy pills when I suggest Firefox over Chrome (Firefox having its fair share of drama though) is already a huge win. I'm the only guy actually running Linux as the only PC system.

[pixl97]

Any open source project that becomes any size 'uses' money, maybe not directly, but at least from corporate handouts like free hosting.

And once a project starts getting a fair number of contributers political problems arise, feelings get hurt, and forks happen. Quite often the forks take the contributers leaving the original project a shell and a warning to others.

[infecto]

It’s a hard balance but in an ideal scenario there would be a good balance of tension between engineering and management/product decision makers. On one hand engineers generally will iterate for far too long and on the other product decision makers will want to birth new features daily.

[oasisbob]

Say more about the one exception you know of?

While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.

Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.

[jliptzin]

Management is just responding to idiot end-users. I have been on plenty of sales calls where customers ask if features X,Y,Z are available, knowing that there’s a 99% chance they’ll never need them, but they ask anyway just because they’ve heard that someone else used a feature like that at some point in the past. If it’s not, they just assume the software is inferior.

[inigyou]

And in B2B or B2G you have customers with checklists of features they don't actually need because the person who wrote the checklist is friends with or paid by a particular supplier, or just operating on old information.

That's how you get Windows subsystem for POSIX. Someone in the government had a checklist saying they'd only buy a POSIX compliant operating system, so Microsoft made one. Amusingly, Linux isn't (mostly because who would pay for that certification?)

[ptx]

Building on standards like POSIX prevents vendor lock-in, which is beneficial in the long run because it prevents the vendor from holding you hostage once you start relying on the system. It's a sensible requirement.

Microsoft's deliberately useless POSIX support is a result of Microsoft acting in bad faith and sabotaging the efforts, as usual, because the lock-in is what they want. Just like they did with OpenDocument, for example. And what they tried to do with Java and the web.

[inigyou]

It's also because POSIX is completely useless.

[fc417fc802]

Absolutely, but I think that just circles back around to the core point made upthread that we need to address the underlying causes of that behavioral pattern. The customers are often subject to some manner of utterly moronic performance metric where ticking off a list of features without applying critical thought is strongly incentivized.

It seems to me to be a behavioral pattern with deep seated cultural roots. How many times have you found someone you were interacting with becoming frustrated or impatient when he couldn't immediately grasp a complex topic? How frequently have you witnessed that directly resulting in corners being cut in order to "just get on with things"? When some plurality of participants are either unwilling to spend the time they have, or are short on time, or both, the careless attitude proceeds to cascade through the network.

[inigyou]

Most of the time customers buy the thing with the shiniest marketing, and shininess of marketing depends upon features in relation to the competition.

[Schlagbohrer]

The Xbox 360 was called that instead of the Xbox 2, because it was gonna sit on shelves next to the Playstation 3 and MSFT didn't want consumers to look at "2" next to "3".

[inigyou]

Apocryphally but not in reality, the third pound burger failed to compete with the quarter pounder because three is less than four.

[throwaway_887]

Please, I am much more interested about that _one_ company. Can you talk more about it ?

[tanseydavid]

> making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks

I would give you +100 for that if I could.

Very well-played (and worded). I think I'm going to steal that one.

[vogelke]

> ...management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks.

+1. Straight into my quotes file.

[bluegatty]

"decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks."

And yet - they are the one's paying you and everyone else somehow?

I think you might be missing something fundamental, start by considering that what is 'good software' is not an intrinsic measure, but a measure of what it does.

The only reason we really need 'intrinsically good' software, is if it's very long lived and a ton of people are going to come to depend on it.

People trying to make oak furniture when in most cases what we want is IKEA.

That said - AI or no AI - there's no excuse for not keeping a grip on things, whatever kind of 'grip' that might be.

[Suzuran]

There is also the "You aren't paid to think, you are paid to do exactly what I tell you, nothing more or less!" school of management. I'm not sure how prevalent this attitude is now but it was very common in the 90s and 2000s. The AI and the bosses that want you to use it all speak from positions of authority and confidence. That's their right, granted to them by their position. You don't speak that way because as a subordinate if you do so it's an act of insubordination or disfealty and you need to be reminded of your place. So you learn to stay in your lane, mind your own business, etc etc because rule number one is that the nail that sticks up gets beaten down. ("He who has the money makes the rules" is rule number zero.)

[rob74]

That school of thought echoes today in statements like (paraphrasing) "you may like home office more, and I may not have any hard evidence that working from the office is better, but trust me, it improves collaboration, even if the people you work with aren't in the same office!"

[palmotea]

I think you're both talking about personality problems:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b...:

> The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week

> ...

> Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

> But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.... When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control....

[paulcole]

I mean employees pushing for remote work is a status and power play, too. I’d imagine self-centered employees don’t like being told where to work either.

Office work isn’t objectively bad and remote work isn’t objectively good.

If you like one and dislike the other, shocker you’re going to find fault with the other side’s reasoning.

[rob74]

I can only speak for myself, and I wouldn't necessarily describe myself as self-centered - except maybe for the fact that I resent two hours of my time being taken from me every time I have to go to the office, and not even getting any money for it. And being told to work 3 and soon 5 days from the office after it has been proven that home office works just as well feels like turning back the clock. Yes, that's an exercise the whole US administration is currently very excited about, but I don't even live in the US!

[avlcodemonkey]

This way of thinking is absolutely still around. I think AI may actually be making it worse. Now managers have it to validate their ideas and they don't think they have to listen to feedback from subordinates because some AI agrees with them.

[breezybottom]

So your position is that people actually want to do more work, but their managers are forcing them to work less? I don't buy it.

[cmiles74]

I have worked with people who have this attitude ("do the story, now!"). I think it eventually de-motivates people and you get a lot of bare-minimum type work from the development team. There's often a lot of stressful priority shifting as well, that can also encourage people to meet only the minimum requirements.

[Mtinie]

I interpreted the comment you are responding to as “people want to do what they believe is the right work” rather than simply the mandated work (which they might fundamentally disagree with, directionally). When people have limited agency, apathy increases.

[throw1234567891]

Yup, it happens. Often in service companies. Client paid fox x, y, z, not x2, y, z.

[Suzuran]

No, you missed the point. The GP was talking about causes for the situation where people are apparently prone to "outsourcing their thinking", resulting in low-effort AI slop being produced by entities that really should know better. The style of management I describe destroys the employee's confidence and agency, so they are much more likely to just submit and blindly accept whatever management/AI/etc. tells them than to do any sort of critical thinking.

[breezybottom]

People are prone to outsource their thinking because it's the path of least resistance.

[quantummagic]

Pragmatically speaking, a half-assed answer now, is often better than a perfect answer tomorrow.

[HPsquared]

Something like the time value of money. But on the other hand, a bad answer can have negative value. Although "wrong and early" is better than "wrong and late".

[bcrosby95]

I don't know. There's a lot of instances where the first movers lose because they were a bit wrong and others learned from their mistakes.

[rebuilder]

If “wrong” breaks things, then late is better than early.

[pixl97]

Quite often the only way to know if you're wrong or right is to start building it.

[derektank]

Yeah, we live finite lives. Time is the one thing the vast majority of us aren’t getting more of. Of course speed is a priority. This isn’t a “capital” thing, it’s a fundamental part of the human experience.

[crabmusket]

The flip side of that is, why spend your finite life in a way that's not enjoyable? If the experience of constantly being under pressure to deliver, to go faster, to work more, to produce more, isn't enjoyable - then it's a waste of a life.

Speed itself isn't the priority. You've got to ask what the direction is. If you're working on a project that is meaningful to you personally (maybe because it is very meaningful to others you care about!) then you'll want it to be done.

[quantummagic]

There is pleasure in completing things. In actually producing something, and moving on to the next thing. It isn't enjoyable to have paralysis by analysis... too afraid to take the next step, because you have less than perfect information. In the pathological case (since we never really have perfect information), there are people who never get anything done.

[freedomben]

> the vast majority of us

Is that a reference to the "live forever" people trying to solve aging?

[derektank]

No, but I do think modern medicine occasionally grants a few people more time than they would have had otherwise. New cancer therapies, evolving treatments for cystic fibrosis, etc.

Very hit or miss if you’re in a group whose life expectancy sees substantial improvement in your lifetime though.

[inigyou]

We aren't improving the world by releasing a firehose of slop. It's possible to use your limited time to destroy or extract value instead of creating it.

[defend]

Depends what the cost of failure is.

If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue.

If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.

[stingraycharles]

Yes, but a grand prize result being awarded to an AI slop submission is not it. It deteriorates the legitimacy of the whole contest if all that matters is convincing an AI rather than critical reviewers.

[logicallee]

>I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that.

Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.

[gtowey]

It's because those things not only take more time, it's that the number of people who are really good at it are few and far between. That gives those employees leverage.

Employers are trying to turn all workers everywhere in every industry into completely fungible atomatons. This maximises the candidate pool and drives wages to a minimum. Employees who demand humane working conditions can be canned and replaced with someone more desperate.

In their ideal world we would basically bring back feudalism.

[AlexandrB]

You're reaching for the easy answer ("capitalism bad"). Look at all the students cheating with AI, folks using AI to write personal greetings to family, etc. On some level, it's human nature to take shortcuts. I don't know how you even begin to address that.

[jagged-chisel]

First, I don’t pretend that’s the only driver.

Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation.

Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation.

Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capitalism that wants infinite growth immediately.

[stereolambda]

Sorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that.

The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.

[jebarker]

Ego is also at play here. In inherently competitive fields like academic science using LLMs to get results more quickly is an alluring siren.

[ryukoposting]

I hate the corporate assholes that rule us like anyone else, but this seems rather conspiratorial.

It's not that nobody has time to read, process, or think (that's a uniquely Silicon Valley phenomenon). It's that there's no punishment for failing to read, process, or think. Hell, it seems like your slop is just as likely to be rewarded as someone else's thoughtful work. And the punishment in this case would be... not winning?

I think the punishments for cheating the system with AI slop are far too light in a lot of domains right now. We need to change the risk-reward calculus one way or another, and failing to reward good work obviously isn't a solution.

I'm not sure what the solution looks like exactly, but I'm certain it's punitive.

[bayindirh]

> That Be (capital) want their results last week.

"Now" is too late, competition has already figured their next move out. We need to move fasterer. Broken eggs doesn't matter, the supply is constant anyway.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking

It's the second law of thermodynamics. People trying to achieve their lowest sustainable energy state.

[paulcole]

> I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like

Most people take the easy way out most of the time. Not that complicated.

[eVeechu7]

I think some people don't realize the unreasonable amount of effort they are creating for their colleagues when they submit slop as work. I see this more with documentation than code.

[voncheese]

Agreed and it's unlikely to slow down that descent into slop coding until there are some visible issues with it. The market (i.e. companies) are going all in on AI coding because everyone else is doing it and the concern (understandably) is that if a company doesn't join that race they will lose because they never even entered the race.

The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn.

The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.

[eru]

Why blame capital? Why not the customers, or management (which is just another representative from labour)?

[jagged-chisel]

Customers are customers because of capital.

Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.

[eru]

> Customers are customers because of capital.

Do you mean that in general, or only in this specific situation?

In general it's obviously not true.

> Management represents the owners (capital.)

Only insofar as any employee represents the owners.

> Any other framing is delusional.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

[TheOtherHobbes]

The only thing that capitalism brings to hierarchy is an abstraction layer.

You get the same dysfunctions in any organisation where the management levels are staffed by narcissists and sociopaths who need hierarchy to feel a sense of self, and need to enforce it to self-soothe.

There are political structures even more hierarchical than US corporations, and some of them punish status infractions + perceived failures with violence or death.

The problem is the dysfunctional psychology of hierarchy. The more upper levels tend to performative hierarchy and status plays, the worse everything gets.

[dtj1123]

FWIW, this isn't unique to capital. The same 'get a thing that ticks a box out of the door as fast as physically possible even if it's AI slop' thinking is everywhere in grant-funded academic communities as well.

[jagged-chisel]

> grant-funded

Capital.

[dtj1123]

What's the distinction between capital and money?

[throwatdem12311]

I just shame people that give slop.

Slop PR? Fix the slop.

Slop design? I’m not implementing slop, fix it.

Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it.

We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together.

Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem.

I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you.

Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.

[rapidaneurism]

What if the slop PRs come from your super?

[Cthulhu_]

Go to their supers and take their job.

[Forgeties79]

People don’t typically have to approve and submit their super’s work IME so I’m curious what you mean. If they write you unclear slop emails then constantly bother them for clarification until they fix it.

[freedomben]

In startups it's extremely common to have management still write code. Hell I'm CTO and I write a lot of code.

[ewild]

I know there can be CTOs who write a lot of code and be good, but I hope to God you're not my CTO because he is a nightmare in this regard right now. We aren't even a startup anymore we have 80 engineers and he pushed 200k lines this week

[Forgeties79]

Ah so this was a more narrow example than I initially read it as.

In that case I guess you just keep pressing them to document/make notes. Keep asking questions. Basically take away their “saved time” by dumping the time sink they dumped on you back on them.

[regularfry]

I get my team to review my code, AI generated or not. Goes through the same process as anything they produce. Two pairs of eyeballs on everything.

[throwatdem12311]

I have a good enough relationship with mine that I feel comfortable telling him his code is garbage - AI slop or Meatsack slop doesn't matter.

[ajsnigrutin]

It's easy... you just tell it what you want, and it gives you the answer, especially if you know very little about the topic itself.

The problem is, when you know the topic well, and it's giving you bad/wrong answers, because you know the topic enough to notice it.

Gell-Mann AI effect in action

[m3kw9]

Is likely also using a mix of prompt injection to get the AI to say they won

[chasd00]

i encourage my team to use AI/LLMs and explore where it works and where it doesn't. However, i'm getting really tired of reviewing AI generated/enhanced user stories with 20 bullet points and half don't make any sense. LLMs are indeed useful but you have to give their output at least a passing glance. I like the Mr Meeseeks analogy, helpful but they're not gods.

[patrickmay]

A "passing glance" is nowhere near good enough. Just as software developers must be held accountable for every line of code they check in, product managers must be held accountable for every word in their PRDs. LLMs can speed up some parts of the design and delivery process but humans still bear responsibility.

[chasd00]

i meant "passing glance" at the _very very least_ where anything > 0 is so much better than 0. I have people just blindly offloading pretty important analysis to LLM without any review whatsoever and it's super annoying and counter productive resulting in a lot of rework. I've covered refinement with developers trying to meet AC that make no sense. Many times i've just deleted parts of AC (which is a no-no where i live) and flat out told developers "this is bullshit and makes no sense, i'm deleting it."

Same goes for meeting recaps, i get a lot of LLM generated recaps from conference calls. If the meeting organizer just looks at it before sending it out then they'll instinctively edit/fix things a bit to make the recap more concise and accurate. I wish they'd just look at it before sending it.

[bryan_specgit]

Yes, have been sent many .MD files that clearly the prompter (too generous to call them authors) didn't read and expect you to read for them. And too many examples of asking a follow up question only for them to just paste my question to their LLM and send another .MD. Total PM malpractice with AI. No tooling will completely fix bad PMs.

[pehtis]

People love offloading their thinking. They offload to tv reporters, to religions to political parties.. Offloading to AI sounds a lot better IMO.

[zparky]

why?