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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

#221

Post by koyote »

recursive wrote: post #204
SoftTalker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No one's ever been able to explain story points to me without saying something like "Story points are kind of like how long it will take to implement, except it's not that". So what is it then? All the explanations and examples are in units of time, but with a disclaimer saying that the true nature of story points is not time-based, except for the fact that they can only be explained in terms of time.

I always see SP a combination of time and risk. I think a lot of people do not include risk in the estimate.

So a story might be estimated at 3SP to implement but there's a high risk that it would blow out (e.g. idea was not fully proven in a PoC, work is in an area that is historically underestimated, reliance on a different team, etc.), so we set it to 5SP to include that risk. Maybe 50% of the time it does get finished in what a normal 3SP would finish in, but at least we've covered the 50% of time it blows out.

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

#222

Post by at-fates-hands »

nradov wrote: post #148
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…

When management starts tracking improvements in story point productivity then the agile teams inflate their story point estimates. Sometimes this involves splitting user stories in ways that don't really make sense from a customer perspective just for the sake of having a place to tack on more points. And I'm not opposed to using story points, they have some utility within an agile team or program. They just aren't a…

A few years ago I was on a massive project to rebuild and redesign a major public facing portal. Our dev team was nails, cranking out features and components on a very tight time table. Several other teams were inflating their story point estimates so when the higher ups would get their weekly reports, our team was always in dead last for completing story points.

Our manager brought us into an all hands meeting and kind of read us the riot act because now we were on "Bob the executive" radar because it looked like we really weren't delivering much week by week. Had anybody actually looked at the amount of work we were doing and what we were shipping, it wouldn't be close.

Exactly as you predicted, we started over inflating our stories, creating Epics when they weren't needed, breaking out a single feature into a dozen or more stories. Over the next few weeks, we were all getting pats on the back for "really picking up the pace". When in reality, we were just doing the same thing we always did.

It just reinforced the idea that Agile had turned into a system that was easy to manipulate to create the illusion you were doing more than you really were. I imagine we're going to see a lot more of this as C-Suite folks start clamoring for ROI on the millions they're spending on tokens.

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

#223

Post by recursive »

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?

Some of us still haven't figured out how to hold it right. So on average it doesn't make anything easier. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails. Net effort change for me is about a wash. I know this is different from most peoples' experience, and I don't know I suck at using it. But I'm not generally inclined to use it much as a result.

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

#224

Post by lbrito »

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…

>What about the filesystem developer who fell in love with his chatbot girlfriend

Fear not: he has a place to feel welcome and included!

https://www.newsweek.com/inside-world-first-ai-dating-cafe-1...

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

#225

Post by graphememes »

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…

This is a really bad take, many on hackernews have a very skewed idea of what a CEO thinks about its employees it seems, or why firings happen in the first place.

Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, if you're doing this you're quite literally just putting yourself in scope.

Just read coinbase today. They are culling those who are not adopting the future because they get in the way of progress. They don't help, they don't push things forward and they hold back those who do.

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

#226

Post by AngryData »

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.

Atleast 90% of the time whenever someone mentions Ford it is to spew out Ford PR garbage they once heard that they took as real history instead of the marketing it really is. It really should be held up as an example of how powerful well designed PR is and the myths it generates.

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

#227

Post by ninjagoo »

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…

> pointing a dumb webcam at my washer and dryer so I can tell if they're done without running up and down two flights or stairs). I just wanted to be able to look at the whole scene and manually pick the ROI to extract and display on my home dashboard. So I asked the AI to build me a stupid little web UI where I can just click to select the ROI center, and what it built me in 10 seconds was perfect for my needs.

The machines all beep when they're done.

A baby monitor in the machine area will accomplish the same thing :-)

But of course the project is much more fun ...

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

#228

Post by ttoinou »

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.

Please go ahead and train juniors on your free time. Put your resources where your mouth is.

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

#229

Post by ninjagoo »

QuercusMax wrote: post #197
tardedmeme wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> how much time is left on the cycle

Ooh, new requirement!

Set timer on phone when setting timer on machine...

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

#230

Post by patch_dev »

asdfman123 wrote: post #199
testudovictoria wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?
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