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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

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Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#51

Post by kj4211cash »

pards wrote: post #7

In my large enterprise world, AI adoption hasn't made it outside of the development teams - only developers have access to Github Copilot. Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production. Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. AI makes these post-development bottlenecks w…

We have a "two timelines" approach going on and I'm curious if others are seeing the same. There are official "Engineering-supported" services. There development speed is not the bottleneck. Engineers demand clean requirements that take forever to show up. Testing and deployment scheduling also take forever post-development. Important people are so fed-up that they've started hiring people to vibe code and develop services without going through Engineering. Code is shipped much faster here but technical debt accumulates rapidly. The important people are beginning to hire Data Scientists who sit outside of the Tech org to manage the AI code. It's all very interesting.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#52

Post by threecheese »

TIL my $company has used the same consultants as this guy. We started with Training and Champions, to Leadership/Lab/Crowd with a CoE/brown bags.

We are definitely struggling with the same issues author describes, but even worse the leaders down at the Crowd level have some perverse need to achieve reuse across their teams, rather than letting their Crowd experiment. One team does something interesting, we must stop and get that thing out to all teams in that group, so everyone “benefits”. This is a scarcity mindset, which made sense pre-AI where code was costly and ideas were more valuable.

At the same time, everyone not only has to do their work, they need to be 25% more efficient from AI (new KPIs), and so their own learnings slow to a halt, and the team with the cool idea has to give presentations instead of hacking.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#53

Post by olsondv »

thfuran wrote: post #46
olsondv wrote: post #6

The post hits the nail on the head with the messy middle. There is simply no motivation to develop this sort of intelligence loop as a dev who has their own responsibilities which their job depend on. Management can ask as nicely as they want, but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free. I might share a tool if it’s useful. All the learning of how to wrangle AI or set…

>but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free. If your employer is expecting that you selflessly share your time for free, you’re getting fucked. Most people are paid to do their job. They are, of course, then expected to work for their employers while on the clock.

May not have been clear. My job is not AI development. I have features to deliver. The ask from employer is to add the AI knowledge sharing on top of it. They don’t pay for that. When layoffs come, it wouldn’t save me from missed deliverables.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#54

Post by romaniv »

> "Where is the ROI for the 2 mio € we paid Anthropic last year?"

The bias in the assumptions here is absolutely bonkers.

Problem: GenAI is not generating any visible return on investment.

"Solution": rearrange your entire development organization around the technology and start inventing new tooling.

What's entirely obvious is that the point of such articles is not the stuff they purportedly discuss, but the normalization of assumptions those discussions are based on.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#56

Post by dev360 »

pards wrote: post #7

In my large enterprise world, AI adoption hasn't made it outside of the development teams - only developers have access to Github Copilot. Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production. Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. AI makes these post-development bottlenecks w…

Its trickling in slowly to non dev teams. Im consulting with a large fin-tech on Enterprise-wide AI adoption at the moment, and I'm seeing the same parallels though: you have power users that reap disproportionate rewards from it, and then you have the "tab complete" crowd that copy paste things into the prompt.

This was a huge motivation behind me trying to design an AI automation platform that comes "batteries included". I also think a lot of orgs, even engineering orgs do not know how to configure basic things like Claude plugin repositories into their installs.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#57

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

thfuran wrote: post #44
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which isn't to say that most software development isn't woefully ineff…

>Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. I think this is probably going to happen at the same time that the providers start really jacking up token prices to extract all the value they can.

Almost certainly. Software firms are pretty bad at self-evaluation and they're profitable enough that Capitalism won't force them to do it either.

Right now the subscriptions are still in the range of reasonable business expenses, but pretty soon they'll have to jump and $200/month/seat subscriptions turning into $2000/month/seat subscriptions is going to get even very badly ran companies to re-evaluate.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#58

Post by 2ndorderthought »

yetihehe wrote: post #28
razodactyl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing this too. Machines are great at pumping out content. Tl;dr's, quick references / QuickStarts / cheat sheets and FAQs are also some things they're great at generating.

Like in that comic strip[0], where one side uses AI to inflate his bullet points to make it look better and have more content in the email, then other side uses AI to summarize it to bullet points. [0] https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

This happens a probably a billion times a day. I shudder to think of the cost of it. Especially after knowing how LLMs aren't great at summarizing nor are they flawless at expanding information

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#59

Post by nkrisc »

lxgr wrote: post #45
forinti wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More code means more support and more maintenance. If your team is already overloaded or if it's going to be reduced because of AI, things are going to get tough.

My bigger concern is actually that, if a company isn't careful, the bloat (complexity, amount of code, other artifacts etc.) will just balloon and largely cancel out any gains. Feedback is often only considered once something is already on fire (financially, functionally, or literally).

That’s the game plan for the AI companies: once companies have massive codebases of critical AI generated code and a skeleton crew of prompt engineers they’re going to be locked in to the AI product to develop anything new.

They’re not even selling shovels, they’re selling subscriptions for shovels.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#60

Post by busterarm »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #57
thfuran wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. I think this is probably going to happen at the same time that the providers start really jacking up token prices to extract all the value they can.

Almost certainly. Software firms are pretty bad at self-evaluation and they're profitable enough that Capitalism won't force them to do it either. Right now the subscriptions are still in the range of reasonable business expenses, but pretty soon they'll have to jump and $200/month/seat subscriptions turning into $2000/month/seat subscriptions is going to get even very badly ran companies to re-evaluate.

It's worse than that. Developers themselves are drunk. They'll be cut off from tools right when they no longer understand the underlying code they're responsible for.

We're already here even. I know of a company that was doubling their Codex spend and hitting the cap week over week and finally they had enough and stopped increasing. Then they maxed out on credits and had a week of no Codex. A large percentage of the engineers loudly refused to work for the rest of the week. They were managing the Codex managing the codebase and were totally incapable of dealing with its output without it.

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