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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

#151

Post by ericmcer »

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…

That's enterprise tech also?

I wonder what adoption is like at older non-tech companies.

The office next to mine is being used to teach a bunch of 20-30 year olds how to be insurance brokers using a powerpoint presentation. Copy paste the presentation into an LLM and you just replaced them all. It feels like... things might be kind of dark in 10-20 years if we just keep barreling down this road.

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

#152

Post by Brian_K_White »

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 go completely the opposite direction. I stick my name right in the script and write a wiki page documenting it as clearly as I can manage. It becomes part of my value proposition to the company.

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

#153

Post by QuercusMax »

ericmcer wrote: post #151
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…

That's enterprise tech also? I wonder what adoption is like at older non-tech companies. The office next to mine is being used to teach a bunch of 20-30 year olds how to be insurance brokers using a powerpoint presentation. Copy paste the presentation into an LLM and you just replaced them all. It feels like... things might be kind of dark in 10-20 years if we just keep barreling down this road.

A lot of Bullshit Jobs[1] are going to be replaced by AI - it's not clear whether these "brokers" who can be trained with a powerpoint presentation are actually doing anything useful for society or even for the economy.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

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

#154

Post by 9x39 »

r_lee wrote: post #129
9x39 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another angle I see is that AI tools start by benefiting the individual and the user captures the increased productivity (you could argue appearance thereof) in the form of slack time. Some tedium almost eliminated here, a problem handed off and crushed over there, and we've got an extra hour or four back in our day. Does that person rationally go find more work to take on with that reclaimed time? Probably not unles…

I see a lot of this talk on HN yet I don't see anyone question whether management will be just as excited to see that less work is needed and that it'd just result in layoffs

Oh, they would be, but the benefits of AI aren't evenly spread like peanut butter. I subscribe to the 'ai as amplifier' POV, so the fast get faster, and generally productive people don't get squeezed or the scrutiny the laggards do IME.

Contrast to remote work where the benefit was extended to all regardless of performance, thus becoming a large target for management to cut.

I think the talk about management & capital demanding ROI will be the inflection point to watch, as a downstream effect could be AI haves & have-nots, depending on open weight models' competitiveness and local capability relative to the SOTA models.

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

#155

Post by ericmcer »

QuercusMax wrote: post #153
ericmcer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's enterprise tech also? I wonder what adoption is like at older non-tech companies. The office next to mine is being used to teach a bunch of 20-30 year olds how to be insurance brokers using a powerpoint presentation. Copy paste the presentation into an LLM and you just replaced them all. It feels like... things might be kind of dark in 10-20 years if we just keep barreling down this road.

A lot of Bullshit Jobs[1] are going to be replaced by AI - it's not clear whether these "brokers" who can be trained with a powerpoint presentation are actually doing anything useful for society or even for the economy. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Yeah but I mean...

My dog gets excited and barks to let me know whenever someone is at the door. It might crush his spirit if he knew he is just a useless pet and his contribution is meaningless.

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

#156

Post by AlotOfReading »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #127
palmotea wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever . The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command. If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business…

Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed. Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing: Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there. The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument…

An assembly line is plumbing too. And just like software, while there are a finite number of variants at any specific time, the plumbing is constantly being rearranged for various reasons. A line won't look the same in 6 months as it does today.

    Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.
I've sat next to the industrial engineers designing the lines and MechEs working in CAD. My software job wasn't all that different at a high level. We all wrote requirements, made bugfixes, and complained about the tier 1s. They usually spent more time visiting the lines in Asia/Mexico/Michigan/Canada. I just emailed the factory when I needed to fix something.

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

#157

Post by palmotea »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #127
palmotea wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever . The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command. If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business…

Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed. Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing: Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there. The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument…

> Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well.

No, wrong again. Some software development tasks are like plumbing, but that misses a lot. Your claim in sort of like saying since the Wendelstein_7-X has wiring, the manager an electrical contractor would be good to lead that project.

Plumbers and electricians more or less solve the same problems over and over with slightly different parameters, and because of the repetitiveness, they can do a good job by following (a hefty number) of rules of thumb (the building code). A software developer isn't going to go far just throwing design patterns at a problem (though many bad ones try).

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

#158

Post by jldugger »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #144
SoftTalker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We make software just like how Ford makes cars". People who say this kind of thing probably have no idea how Ford makes cars either. The assembly line is the last step. All the research, design, engineering, and testing happens before any sheet metal is stamped out. So the comparison might be more true than not, but unknowingly.

It's not true at all. In software, the factory line is nothing but cp or httpd and neither costs nor produces any value. In cars, the factory line both costs and produces all the value.

> the factory line both costs and produces all the value.

I think the point OP is trying to make is that manufacturing and design are seperate steps with different workflows and expectations. And that the design step does have value, as without it your factory line has nothing particular to make or sell.

Nobody is sitting around Ford trying to make the clay modeling step faster or more error free, it's a design function. But there are hundreds of software execs out there trying to do exactly that. In part because cp and git and make and your other build tools that make up the factory line function are pretty much rock solid and cost optimized to nearly free.

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

#159

Post by agloe_dreams »

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…

Meanwhile in private equity world, they have realized that code is "piling up from 10Xing everyone's performance" and as a result they have solved it by just firing all QA, focusing only on speed to prod, killing signoffs, and scheduling and code review. We are probably going to bankrupt ourselves from an idiotic mistake somewhere here. But nobody will ever know until it happens. Don't take those gates for granted.

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

#160

Post by nazcan »

soks86 wrote: post #140
nazcan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be the biggest bottleneck, but if you can have a similar amount of time, but reduce the number of engineers by 30%, that's a huge win. And having less people involved means there is much less communication and alignment. Not to say it's a panacea.

That's an interesting take I don't see anyone else bringing up. It would also, I would think, make it easier for the 30% fewer engineers to earn a better living in the long run and reduce human management effort. This makes the most sense to me. So far AI, being fallible, can only augment humans so you can have less humans to do the same work (or tasks where accuracy can be less than 100%, like lower level support ca…

The debugging improvements have been huge for me too. I was debugging some financial software, and while it took a few shots, just with access to my code and not to the database that showed the issue, it found a fairly complex problem.
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