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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#61
I read the entire post, and I think this company has no expertise at all. So I'd rather they just used AI writing instead.At least Frontier model AI doesn't make such overblown claims.

They proudly claim that every AI project they've observed over the past year and a half had a 0% success rate, and that they've rejected all AI implementation work. While this is evidence that the market is crazy, at its core, it's a painful confession that they have no engineering expertise to implement and control modern AI architectures like RAG, Agentic Workflow, and context window optimization to meet business requirements. I find it fascinating how they're packaging that. It's basically saying, 'We're behind the times.'

There are already products that have achieved results by using AI as part of their development process, yet lumping all different types of AI usage into a single failure category is not only inaccurate but also misleading.

Same goes for the Snowflake Cortex anecdote. Even a freelancer like me can explain technical limitations and distinguish between what's possible and what's not, especially when clients are eager.

There's no engineering analysis in this entire post about why AI fails. No mention of technical bottlenecks like vector DB retrieval quality degradation or prompt injection failures.

I've also worked on RAG for a specific company. For internal knowledge chatbots, it often fails depending on document collection rates and chunking. But none of that is mentioned.

So I understand that AI projects and related things are bad. But there's no analysis of why.

For example, regarding Snowflake, I'm not sure, but did they discuss accuracy in terms of what query set or what ground truth they were using? You're consultants, aren't you?

Honestly, I don't understand why people are excited about this. I'd rather they just used AI. TIt's not about whether human writing is good or bad. It's that this kind of writing feels like a deception of the reader.

When making overgeneralizations, there's a basic minimum standard required.

Saying that making token usage a KPI makes it hard for employees to report is just an 'obvious' fact that's already appeared in far too many essays. Wake up. You're 'consultants.' Consultants are supposed to provide metrics and directions, but all you're doing is shouting into an echo chamber and asking for agreement.

If a significant portion of corporate AI investments are shoddy, you could at least propose specific metrics like document collection rates or user evaluation scores using the very skills you claim to have. I really don't get it.

Just use AI. I wish the OP had used AI. Let me be realistic.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#62
I love this author's article about saving half a million dollars with a click from a while back. Nikhil, if you're reading this, I have a decent war story about a similar situation (I was lucky enough that there were two such things, so I saved a full million a year and was still denied a $15k raise) and so I was really entertained at your post from a few years back. There are actually a lot of lessons to be learned about corporate politics there, about how you can save someone a million a year in perpetuity and promise to do that again next year (which I could have!) and see them still refuse to pay you a single extra cent.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#65
This part toward the end of the article resonated with me:

> If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now

I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#66
post #50

Interesting how op describes his own experience and then assume that every other company around the globe experience exactly the same. He generalizes CEO's behavior but provides no evidence. Cool.

What do you expect from a person other than the generalizations they see from the experiences they have had...? What 'evidence' could possibly be given other than extensive anecdotes?

The article presents hypothesis as fact with insufficient science. I have no problem discussing speculation, but if the author wants to promote their claims to any more than that I would want to see more journalism.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#67
post #13

This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90…

Maybe maybe not. In large organisations for each person creating value with LLMs there are probably more destroying value. Bob used to only waste one person time with LLMs he can waste the entire organisations time.

Anyone can use an LLM make a bad ideas sound like a good idea. I imagine this will lead to insane amounts of productivity loss as the entire organisation ends up pivoting to follow the bad idea of a mediocre VP etc.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#68
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s some selection bias involved especially based on their marking, but you’re misreading what they are saying. > even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. The kind of companies with failing projects seem to be very bad at using AI. That’s different from the normal mix of success and failures at most large companies.

Companies with projects that are doing well don't try to hire consultants who specialized in saving failing projects. No company with a good AI strategy is going to go to the Hermit Tech website where text written in Ye Olde Font explains that they'll use ancient techniques from the 80s and 90s to make your software work and thinks, "These are the right people for our AI job!" These people are trying to carve out a n…

Christ they are profiting off of reaction, they're like Trump but even worse since at least Trump is not stupid enough to be anti-technology.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#69
As someone who uses LLMS for coding, ideas validation and research, I think the article is biased against AI forctge wrong reasons.

If you know what you are looking for and know what “a solution looks like”, AI is amazing at distilling ideas. If you have no clue, the AI will return “clueless” solutions.

It is just like before the AI: there are people who know how to search the web, read and understand documentation and so on. And then there are peole who are incapable.

AI is naking the latter category fail incredibly fast. Really, nothing new under the sun: garbage in, garbage out.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#70
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do yo have links handy for AI-assisted engineering going positively? The case I have on my mind of it going negatively is this recent Ford case [1] It's not that I believe it couldn't go positively, of course. [1] Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o

As @simonw said, the Ford example isn’t a good one. As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Here on HN and with the engineers I know, you see people claiming multiples of productivity on coding tasks. But you also see people complaining about drowning in slop PRs. I think there’s a lot of confounding factors to these reports. The type of work matters a lot: bug fixing good, prototypi…

> As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out.

Anecdotally, AI-assisted engineering has helped me flesh out ideas or to learn extremely complicated APIs faster than trying to understand the docs (which usually are labyrinthine). MS COM ones, for example. I can go read the docs but it's easier to get a quick idea of what I need to do if I ask Claude to provide me an example of doing something specific with it, because MS's code samples (particularly their full ones in, say, the windows Desktop SDK repo) have always been annoying for me to wade through because I have to filter out a bunch of noise. I can't (and won't) try to guestimate "productivity" improvements though, but as an assistant AI has (somewhat) helped. I still do all the engineering work though. Along with it giving me tips on using more modern language features for languages like C++.

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