I find the "em dashes mean AI" trope annoying — I've been typing em dashes since I learned how to do this on a Mac, which was around 2007 I think. Shift-Option-hyphen became second nature, just like Option-; for an ellipsis (…). It's just how I write. Two hyphens now seem outright barbaric.
Appearing productive in the workplace
481–490 of 686 posts
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#482Well this unlocked a new fear, I can imagine all the similar “nests” of AI generated content out there being created right now, I am likely to have to untangle one some day, or at least break it to someone that it’s garbage, almost as if the AI itself has built a nest and is hoarding artifacts but it’s actually the human deciding to bundle up the slop and put a bow on it.
Yes, one of those nests is AI-generated "books" on amazon which I just discovered a couple of days ago. For now it's really obvious but at some point it won't be.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#483Having trouble understanding the final line: > Also, those that claimed this article is ironically a casualty of it’s own complaint are 100% right, Kudos. Why would the article be a casualty of its own complaint?
Yeah, that caught me off guard as well. Is it supposed to be a plot twist revealing the article is written/elongated with AI assistance? Didn’t immediately feel that way upon first reading, but who knows anymore.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#484I find the "em dashes mean AI" trope annoying — I've been typing em dashes since I learned how to do this on a Mac, which was around 2007 I think. Shift-Option-hyphen became second nature, just like Option-; for an ellipsis (…). It's just how I write. Two hyphens now seem outright barbaric.
It's just a classic noise problem. For better or worse people are flooding the internet with LLM output and the vast majority is not worth reading. People will focus on cheap "tells" to judge what's worth spending their time reading.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#485Earlier 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…
I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out th…
Counter-question: if quite a lot of things have also been like this before to a lesser degree, should we not oppose efforts to make everything like this to a greater degree?
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#486> He produced a great deal of code, a great deal of documentation, a great deal of what looked, to anyone who did not know what to look for, like progress. He could not, when asked, explain how any of it actually worked. Solution: managers need to ask 'how does $THING_YOU_MADE actually work?'. Pre-AI, it could be taken for granted that if someone was skilled enough to write complex code/documentation then they have a…
>Solution: managers need to ask 'how does $THING_YOU_MADE actually work?'.
"Claude please tell me how $THING_YOU_MADE works in easy to understand language so I can explain it to my manager."
Memorise that and there you go. If the manager doesn't know how it works and has to trust the engineer, what are the chances that a memorised articulate explanation will satisfy them?
The issue (like most corpo issues) is one of incentives. Everyone's incentivised to do more work more quickly for a cheaper price. It's very fast to generate output but very slow to properly vet it.
What could change the current dynamics is if generation becomes way more expensive. Maybe that will happen because the token economy starts being subsidised? Maybe someone will eventually establish a monopoly on the agentic coding market and will start squeezing companies dependent on them?
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#487What 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…
I saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted. My last job we watched a…
>It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work.
Good riddance, the ocean floor will soon be littered with Titanics like this.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#488Someone i know found a Wonderful word for this: Inkompetenzkompensierungskompetenz
This is German and basically just means that someone has the competency to compensate for their own incompetency's, just that AI now does that for us and we slowly notice how important that even is in the day to day life.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#489> "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…
This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other eng…
I'm starting to see pushback for this. I know a Product Manager that was fired for padding his documentation with AI to the point there were mistakes and wasted work due to AI hallucinations.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#490i 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…
FWIW I was watching an interview with the founder of Claude Code and he claims that at Anthropic, no code is written by hand anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI&pp=0gcJCQMLAYcqI...