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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

61–70 of 298 posts

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

#61
post #54

> "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 normali…

LLMs can't fail, they can only be failed ... by you!

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

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could vibe yourself up an AMA tool where people can submit questions, an agent goes to work on them, then the question and agent answer sit in a queue waiting for you to provide a review and give your weigh-in.

I'm pretty sure this is the best idea I've ever heard of for this technology. You should build that tool and it should become mandatory throughout the tech world. Can we get some enabling legislation? A UN resolution perhaps?

Despite the snark I’ll engage.

The “get an immediate agent answer then a human expert’s fast-follow” is I think a great idea for many domains - imagine if you could get legal advice this way; the agent will have already explained the basics and the human expert just has to provide corrections - way less typing by humans.

Also, the corrections are now documented and could become future grounding for the agent.

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

#63
My biggest gripe with language models is that technical and conceptual discussions which used to be led organically (with people having to think about what others wrote and decide what to reply themselves) now turned into AI slop avalanches with participants just copy pasting obviously generated text into the discussion. And those texts are always very long and super weird to respond to because they usually are overall correct enough so you can't just reject them but are flawed all over the place, missing the point, lacking depth where it would be important, skipping over important steps. This is a huge time waste. Funnily, many people have no idea how obvious it is that their texts are generated and rubbish at that.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already happens here. I am old dev who was the goto guy for people with certain business and technical questions. Not anymore (which is part good, as I'm interrupted much less, and part bad, as sometimes they regard the wrong answer as truth).

You could vibe yourself up an AMA tool where people can submit questions, an agent goes to work on them, then the question and agent answer sit in a queue waiting for you to provide a review and give your weigh-in.

Coworkers are demonstrating that they value immediacy and possibly also some combination of embarrassment about their question or social anxiety about asking someone else, over accuracy. Not only does that still require the coworker to review the question, and also lose immediacy vs an LLM, but it might even take longer before rogerthis gets around to reviewing the queue.

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

#65
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…

What's old is new again [0][1][2]

The Theory of Constraints - AI Era

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-...

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else bein…

What are your thoughts on open source? Seems like the same problem writ large

I love open source, but you are correct in identifying it as a very similar problem, though it's more a problem with software licensing than source code being publically available. Usually the argument is made that FOSS ends up as free labor, which is true in a lot of ways, but I see FOSS devaluing software as a whole. When software is open and libre, that sends a psychological signal that the software isn't that valuable. There would still be FOSS in a world where even projects like React charged a licensing fee to big organizations, but in that case there would be more choice between YOLO with free software or paying for quality software; as token expenses have proven, many companies could absolutely pay for the latter many times over. In terms of specifically open source, however, companies get a bit of a loophole in that their own employees (or LLM of choice) can be "inspired* by the source code and clone aspects of commercial software. This has the effect of devaluing the skill of individual software engineers to being glorified script kiddies.

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

#67
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…

Sounds like the typical ServiceNow paralysis. The “Mother May I” model.

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

#68
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…

The Mythical Man Month should really be a mandatory reading for anyone working in software… and I don’t mean reading a Claude summary

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

#69

Great article. The part that stood out to me is the shift in how organizations define work. In the old model, performance and OKRs were anchored in disciplines, job titles, and role-specific expectations. In the AI era, those boundaries are starting to collapse. The deeper issue is psychological and organizational: people are constantly negotiating the line between “this is my job” and “this is not my responsibility.…

Eventually whoever is responsible to fix prod incidents and maintain has the ownership. And I agree that’s pretty messy in a world where agents are crossing those boundaries. Will the AI engineer with their horde of agents be responsible to keep everything running? I really doubt so, but we will see

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

#70
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…

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