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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

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

#191

Post by zbentley »

dgellow wrote: post #69
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.…

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

> whoever is responsible to fix prod incidents and maintain has the ownership.

There's a mistaken assumption under there that businesses can identify who that statement describes.

Some can. But a lot of businesses cannot identify and reward, or support, or just not RIF, those people. Like a lot a lot. More than I'm comfortable lumping under statements like "well those are just bad places to work/places that should be shut down".

There's no punchline or counterproposal there; that's just my observation.

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

#194

Post by tardedmeme »

SoftTalker wrote: post #138
daheza wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a manager and the VPs are starting to ask - how many story points are we getting with AI now. Now we do story points = number of days to implement. (I know this is not real agile but just assume you are in the same position) I can't answer that question but plenty of other managers are fully ready to just give bogus numbers. For my team, use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost. The coding part of the st…

> story points = number of days to implement Some variant of this has been the case in every agile team I've ever worked on.

I've always asked for it when joining a team to calibrate my story point estimates. At some teams 1 point is about a half hour task and at other teams it's a full day.

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

#195

Post by Ma8ee »

SoftTalker wrote: post #137
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…

"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.

Exactly. It's just that they mix up the steps. The last step, the assembly, is highly automated and usually very fast in software production, since it is done by a compiler (and the aptly named, assembler). The people involved are doing engineering and design, which is much harder to control.

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

#196

Post by tardedmeme »

QuercusMax wrote: post #187
DoctorOetker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The plumber who has a robot who can make perfectly measured custom one-off tools and specially constructed piping runs inside your walls is going to have super powers compared to somebody who has to go to home depot and assemble a bunch of PVC pipes or whatever. Just the other day I needed to make a calibration interface for a home automation app (pointing a dumb webcam at my washer and dryer so I can tell if they're…

Have you considered taping a sensor to the light, or measuring the electrical current flowing through the power cord? Both should be a bit more reliable. The idea of messing with mains power is scary at first but with basic precautions it's fine, and I think you can buy current meters with various interfaces if you aren't comfortable.

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

#197

Post by QuercusMax »

tardedmeme wrote: post #196
QuercusMax wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plumber who has a robot who can make perfectly measured custom one-off tools and specially constructed piping runs inside your walls is going to have super powers compared to somebody who has to go to home depot and assemble a bunch of PVC pipes or whatever. Just the other day I needed to make a calibration interface for a home automation app (pointing a dumb webcam at my washer and dryer so I can tell if they're…

Have you considered taping a sensor to the light, or measuring the electrical current flowing through the power cord? Both should be a bit more reliable. The idea of messing with mains power is scary at first but with basic precautions it's fine, and I think you can buy current meters with various interfaces if you aren't comfortable.

Why would I buy power meters and mess around with indirect signals that don't measure what I want (how much time is left on the cycle) and instead just tell me whether it's running?

I already have an old webcam and raspi I'm not using, and they measure exactly what I care about.

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

#198

Post by testudovictoria »

herpderperator wrote: post #168
asdfman123 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now. 2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is t…

If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.

The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.

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

#199

Post by asdfman123 »

testudovictoria wrote: post #198
herpderperator wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.

The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.

No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase.

If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years?

It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.

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

#200

Post by sdevonoes »

sanderjd wrote: post #172
dakiol wrote: post #126

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?" AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop…

Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?

Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit.

Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out there. And as the pool of engineers gets reduced, the chances of you being not as good as you thought go up. So the real question is: can you (we all) still make a good living by not using llms. You know support each other and fuck the higher ups? No, we cant. Wwe are full of ourselves, full of elitism (this is HN). We are rational folks, we believe in numbers, in data; we know what we deserve. fuck the rest. The ones who win are the higher ups, of course, not us.

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