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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#141

Post by danaw »

dude250711 wrote: post #139
danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

> related, i feel it's likely teams that go "all in" on agentic coding are going to inadvertently sabotage their product and their teams in the long run. They are trying to get warm by pissing their pants.

lol it does have that vibe

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#142

Post by rororournouh »

mediaman wrote: post #130
smallmancontrov wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?

I think it likely performed well in A/B preference tests with chat users. I've noticed Claude does far fewer listicles than ChatGPT. I suspect that they don't blindly follow supervised learning feedback from chats as much as ChatGPT. I get Apple vs Google design approach from those two companies, in that Apple tends not to obsess over interaction data, instead using design principles, while Google just tests everythi…

I’m given to understand that Anthropic uses something called Constitutional AI, where there is a central document of desirable and undesirable qualities (as well as reinforcement learning) whereas OpenAI relies more heavily on direct human feedback and rating with human trainers evaluating responses and the model conforming to those preferences.

I also much prefer the output of Claude at present.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#143

Post by anthonypasq »

wcfrobert wrote: post #42

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifact…

it actually insane that this sort of thing is tolerated. Its a culture thing and frankly just rude. My org is pretty AI-pilled and this type of behavior will just not fly. I need to be assured im talking to a human who is using their brain.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#144

Post by LPisGood »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #126
towers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forcing of competent engineers to vibe code is something I’ll never understand. Also, I’ve heard rewriting people’s vibe coded efforts being a substantial issue, everything that engineers do nowadays seems to be code review.

It would be horrible to rewrite. Not the first commit or whatever. But after a few weeks of people not reading the code it looks more like a write only code base. I refused to go full vibe/agentic coding. So I got to see what was happening. This was only over a short period of time mind you. There was a lot of duplicate and triplicate methods. A lot of the classes were is-a related without inheritance, not the bigges…

How can you read a 1k lone change?

What are you doing where 200kloc is even remotely acceptable? That’s like half a percent of linux.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#145

Post by [deleted] »

LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #92
funimpoded wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing wor…

AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill. I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement. It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people…

[deleted]

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#146

Post by LPisGood »

proofofcontempt wrote: post #19

What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When…

My boss told me enforcing code quality wasn’t important because in 6 months we won’t even read code anymore.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#147

Post by Aurornis »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #122
ge96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?

I first noticed it when Notion became popular.

All of the PMs I interacted with across companies started using Notion for everything at the same time. Filling Notion documents with emojis was the style of the time.

This slightly pre-dated AI tools becoming entirely usable for me.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#148

Post by anthonypasq »

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

people have been making some version of this comment for the past three years, and the only thing that has changes is that you keep adding capabilities.

2 years ago people were saying it was purely autocomplete and enhanced google.

AI bears just continue to eat shit year after year and keep pretending they didnt say that AI would never be capable of what its currently capable of.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#149

Post by proofofcontempt »

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

I'm with you on all apart from code review.

Our team has tried a couple tools. Most of the issues highlighted are either very surface level or non-issues. When it reviews code from the less competent team members, it misses deeper issues which human review has caught, such as when the wrong change has been made to solve a problem which could be solved a better way.

Our manager uses it as evidence to affirm his bias that we don't know what we're doing. It got to the point that he was using a code review tool and pasting the emoji littered output into the PR comments. When we addressed some of the minor issues (extra whitespace for example) he'd post "code review round 2". Very demoralising and some members of the team ended up giving up on reviewing altogether and just approving PRs.

I think it's ok to review your own code but I don't think it should be an enforced constraint in a process, because the entire point of code review from the start was to invest time in helping one another improve. When that is outsourced to a machine, it breaks down the social contract within the team.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#150

Post by XorNot »

nyc_data_geek1 wrote: post #136
physicsguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience I'm pasting a lot more into AI to get the high level summary though.

And they are generating the longer version with AI, that you are then using AI to summarize. This is not adding value for anyone except people whose function is to look busy, and people trying to avoid their busy work.

Put that way it's basically competitive evolutionary pressure to exhaust the context window of the other LLM.
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