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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

81–90 of 298 posts

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

#81
post #79

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.

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

#82
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Sure but here you are not talking about the 100000+ local firm experts for windows networking or coding with agents you are talking about the people who can rewrite the best advice that makes those local experts out of date where their small experiences probably don't make up for not having integrated X, Y or Z yet.

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

#83
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…

Unshipped code can't break. How is it a liability and not an asset? The money maker is making money and the changes that potentially would interfere with that are held up at the gate. Seems like a good thing from a business perspective.

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

#84
In many midsize companies I've worked as an engineer, developing a growth plan is something I have been asked to do, and to share it with my manager. Then at the end of the quarter I go over the growth plan and the manager agrees or disagrees with my actual growth, and gives me a performance bonus befitting my success..

I propose employees create self-training byproducts as a result of any AI interaction. And then they also work with their Cuban manager to make sure that these self-training byproducts are a part of their growth plan. This can guarantee growth without losing that opportunity To interact with the intelligent AI system (on topics that are relevant to the company's short, mid, and long-term strategic advantage,).

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

#85
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…

Over the years, I too have developed ad hoc tools to make my job easier or faster. I don't hide them, but I do not share any since the tools are not really ready for that. I don't have them properly documented, other people would not understand how to use them, why and all the quirks. I suppose a lot of developers do the same.

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

#86

> There is another pressure building underneath all this. AI usage will become more visibly metered. The current enterprise feeling of “everyone has access, don’t worry too much about the bill” will not hold forever, at least not in the form people are getting used to. ... > I do not want to make this a cost panic story, that would be the least interesting way to think about “rented intelligence”. The question is not…

Tokens _are_ as cheap as keystrokes. A single keypress by a full-time SWE averages out to $0.005-$0.02 (depending on typing speed and TC). The relationship is obscured because the keystrokes are usually part of a fixed-price subscription plan but they absolutely have a cost. Prior to AI this was in fact a large reason everyone pontificated about concise programming languages and elegantly factoring problems and DRY and...

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

#87
post #80

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…

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?

It does seem like a highly antagonistic way of working or perhaps I'm just naive.

If your only goal is to maintain a performance lead on your peers, you either need to gain and keep an advantage or find ways to actively make your coworkers disadvantaged (or both). And if you're already doing 1) then 2) isn't a far stretch.

> would you like to work on a team full of people like you?

If their team is already like this, what choice do they have? It's a prisoners dilemma where everyone else is defecting and I'm the sole cooperator.

IMO the onus for solving this is on the business owner, either through establishing a knowledge sharing culture or more comprehensive performance evaluation that rewards these innovations.

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

#88
post #41

Path dependencies between invention and utilization... are complicated and hard to fathom. Our mental models of developments like the industrial revolution, literacy, printing or suchlike tend to be a lot more straightforward than how things play out in practice. When a bottleneck is eliminated... you tend to shortly find the next bottleneck. Meanwhile, there is an underlying assumption everyone seems to make that "m…

>If you work on a terrible enterprise codebase... it's very possible that software quality/quantity isn't actually that important to your organization.

It's possible capitalism will drive all enterprise to terrible codebases.

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

#89
post #80

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…

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?

I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.

But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.

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

#90
post #23

Once people try to increase quality instead of speed they will see how LLMs are powerful. Everything else is just sales pitch by Nvidia and friends.

Make sense to me. I can see how LLMs can help you make better systems. I don't have a christal ball but I can see how focusing on speed (or more precisely volume) can have a lot of unintended consequences.
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