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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

#71

Post by Supermancho »

i_think_so wrote: post #27

> one team uses Copilot as autocomplete and calls it a day. Another team runs Claude Code in tight loops, with tests, reviews, and constant steering. A product owner suddenly prototypes real software instead of mocking screens in Figma. A senior engineer delegates a root-cause analysis to an agent and comes back to the valid solution in under an hour; this would’ve taken him two weeks without AI. A junior person prod…

Indeed. Any developer who has used copilot knows you can't rely on it 100% The post's head image immediately bothered me. Copilot's strength is not on patching SDLC but to speed up the catching of typos and minor oversights. If you're using it as an integral part of SDLC, it causes problems immediately. So why posit the strawman? Marketing.

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

#72

Post by woodydesign »

ohnei wrote: post #31
woodydesign wrote: post #19

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.…

If they create a system to compensate expert AI users wouldn't that career have a problem in that anyone (enticed by the new careers existence and) integrating their advice on any company particulars with a (weeks) more modern approach is basically putting them in the role of domain expert being eliminated.

The part I push back on is the idea that expertise is easy to learn in just a few weeks.

Take Andrej Karpathy as an example. Even if I knew exactly what tools he uses and what his workflow looks like, I still would not be able to produce anything close to what he can produce in a few weeks. And he is not standing still either—he is evolving at the same time.

A lot of real expertise is not in the visible/system-able workflow. It is in someone’s experience, taste, judgment, and wisdom. You can copy the artifact, but you cannot easily copy the thinking behind it: the principles, the decision-making, and the ability to apply those principles across many different/subtle situations.

But I do agree with the concern behind the argument. People may worry that sharing what they know could weaken their own position. And the more uncomfortable question is about peers: if someone’s role can be “retired” because others absorbed their knowledge and skills, then it is hard not to ask, “Am I next?”

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

#73

Post by Mashimo »

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…

Same here, but instead of the developers having access to Github Copilot, some selected few devs have access to some internal proxy, that goes to Amazon bedrock, where we have "400 request" per week to Claude Sonet :))))

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

#74

Post by wildrhythms »

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…

But then how will all of the know-nothing management types get their fingers in the pie?

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

#75

Post by kakacik »

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…

Do you work in my company? :)

I kept saying this since Day 1 of llms - even 99% of development reduction means almost nothing in our company in speed of delivery of whole projects. And we are introducing generator of code that semi-randomly has poor performance when they have perf bottlenecks and fills the codebase with... sometimes questionable solutions. Sure, one has to check the results all the time, but then time is spent on code reviews, not much less than actual (way more fulfilling, rewarding and career-boosting) development.

Now I understand there are many more scenarios where gains are more realistic and sometimes huge, but it certainly ain't my current working place. So I use it sparingly to not atrophy my skillset but work estimates are so far the same and nobody questions that.

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

#76

Post by LeCompteSftware »

olsondv wrote: post #53
thfuran wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I refuse to use LLMs and don't have a job, so I'm just some guy.

What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. This attitude of "your job is to deliver value for the customer, anything else is a distraction, and if you share your hard-earned value-delivery techniques with others then you are a sucker" - this is new, and very disconcerting.

I understand there's not much we can do to stop the cyberpunk dystopia, but do we have to leap in head-first?

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

#77

Post by DrammBA »

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…

It sucks to treat the workplace as adversarial, but we unfortunately have to as long as companies have the zero-sum mindset of "wow, everyone is so productive and we're achieving so much, why do we have so many people again?"

And I'm not a "at work we're a family!" guy, but I wish we could just be excellent at our jobs and share it with each other without worrying if I'm digging my own grave.

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

#78

Post by i_think_so »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #62
i_think_so wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely zero snark. I'm serious. (About the serious part; obviously not the joke part.)

> a great idea for many domains

I completely agree. This is a great idea. If you don't do something with it I'm stealing it. ;-)

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25
rogerthis wrote: post #16

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.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by pu_pe »

ravenstine wrote: post #32
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…

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…

I don't think this way because I like to collaborate. If a colleague can benefit from a tool I made I'm proud to save them time. I also think your attitude doesn't pass the golden rule: would you like to work on a team full of people like you?
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