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The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

rickmanelius.com

61–70 of 90 posts

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

problem is that no one knows what to build and there are way too many ppl employed

I’m seeing kinda the opposite. At some point it becomes obvious what to build and there’s no friction to building it anymore. So you get a flood of low effort copies of the same thing and no one wants to depend on anyone else, and the old value function was that ownership matters. I think the new value function needs to be much more focused on outcomes—and ownership isn’t an outcome.

The result of this is huge wastage in terms of effort and tokens.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#62
post #57

> So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right? Got to admit, I stopped reading here. In my experience, burnout isn't related to the amount of work, but to your confidence in being able to do your job and if you find your job meaningful (like, does it even matter?). I'm probably doing twice as much work now compared to the peri…

I mostly agree with your observations, but in my experience, if you're spread very thin, you may be nearing the sudden burnout onset.

You feel motivated, full of energy, your juggle millions things at once, and then stumble once, then another time. Then your mistakes become more frequent. And you don't even realize you make them, others do... Until eventually you no longer operate efficiently.

Can take a few years to develop.

Take some rest. Especially if you feel productive like never before. It's gonna be hard to shut down for the first few days, so it should be at least a week of rest. Better two.

Chances are: after coming back you'll immediately notice a dozen of stupid decisions you've made.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#63
The myth you fell into is, assuming that the AI is here to increase your personal productivity. No. Think of AI as a vendor who can provide you with contractors that can code for you. 20 years back, if you are promoted as a manager and approved with a budget to hire 10 contractors, what would you do? You would hire 6 coders, 3 testers and a project manager. Your would mostly interact with the PM giving feature specs, and checking out the progress. You might also ask someone to do the code reviews. You won't sit with every coder and go through the code every day.

AI gives you coders, not some "tool" that you can use to make yourself a faster coder.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#64
post #62
post #57

> So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right? Got to admit, I stopped reading here. In my experience, burnout isn't related to the amount of work, but to your confidence in being able to do your job and if you find your job meaningful (like, does it even matter?). I'm probably doing twice as much work now compared to the peri…

I mostly agree with your observations, but in my experience, if you're spread very thin, you may be nearing the sudden burnout onset. You feel motivated, full of energy, your juggle millions things at once, and then stumble once, then another time. Then your mistakes become more frequent. And you don't even realize you make them, others do... Until eventually you no longer operate efficiently. Can take a few years to…

Thank you :)

I think I'm handling this as well, though. I have my own personal retrospective every once in a while where I evaluate the different things I work on and if they're worth continuing, or if there are other things (or just rest) I need to replace one of them with.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#65
post #45

I will never believe the premise of 100x boost from AI, why are we still pushing this narative? Yes, AI is amazing in small, constrained, focused pieces of code but the code is nowhere fit for production and the last 10% needed to ship shows that the 90% that's already been done by AI is absolutely trash. Hacks on top of hacks. Is no one trying to ship polished things to customers anymore, will each of us have a hack…

I think the trick is to learn exactly what things AI can give a 100x speed boost with, and use it for those tasks, and only those.

The tasks where there's little-to-no speed boost at all -- do those yourself. You'll feel better and happier.

The best thing is you'll have much more time to work on those things now, because AI is doing all the stupid/boring/dumb/mundane/I-hate-this-so-much/I-don't-ever-want-to-think-about-this tasks for you, the ones that normally make your brain dribble out your earholes.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#68

This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ir…

AI completely broke some of the signals management used as proxies for team competence. In the past, teams that moved quickly and had a proof of concept to show management were valued for the speed of their execution. Usually a team that could execute quickly had some competent developers who could also quickly execute on the challenges of the implementation when it scaled up to real world problems. Now anyone with e…

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Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI completely broke some of the signals management used as proxies for team competence. In the past, teams that moved quickly and had a proof of concept to show management were valued for the speed of their execution. Usually a team that could execute quickly had some competent developers who could also quickly execute on the challenges of the implementation when it scaled up to real world problems. Now anyone with e…

> AI completely broke some of the signals management used as proxies for team competence. This is very similar to how LLMs were already breaking signals in writing . It was (is?) an enormously important proxy (however imperfect) for a bunch of things like: "put effort into this" or "is smart" or "is interested and engaged" or "has an emotion" or "has carefully considered the idea." Heck, even basic awareness of an is…

In a way, LLMs have made it much more difficult to be believed. On the one hand, my inner paranoiac feels vindicated -- preparing for the worst case, over a lifetime, feels more prescient than it should. On the other hand, making decisions, specifically about how much faith to put into another unfamiliar human, becomes even less tractable.

The work can no longer speak for the human. A nightmare for the introvert.

The work, even before LLMs, struggled to speak for the introvert (and even the extrovert) -- a unique enough work usually results in puzzlement, a questioning of motives, and sometimes even overt ridicule.

Even for writing, it was a struggle. How many times did pieces of writing get ignored (or rapidly skimmed) because they were "TLDR"?

When I was very young (a teen), I wondered (after seeing the films The Matrix and Fight Club) to what degree other people were a dream-like hallucination (basically, those films made the concept of p-zombies accessible to a kid). That childish daydream, is now a reality. My inner paranoiac squeals with delight. Ah, the perversity. Even skill at deception itself can be faked, now. Even the beautiful can treated as if it were hideous.

I wonder if anyone ever made an episode of Star Trek, where one crew-member pranks another (possibly inebriated) crew-member, by having them wake up in a perfect holodeck reconstruction of their ship and crew. How long before they would notice? Weeks could go by, before a red alert dissolves the illusion.

It's after 3am, and I am not inebriated, but fuck I need to sleep. Sometimes I hope I drift into a coma, so that I can deal with things that are, on the one hand hallucinations, but on the other hand _not_ deceptions. There is a universe out there, where _their_ Matrix (film), is Vanilla Sky (amusingly, its inspiration was the film Abre los Ojos, released one year before The Matrix -- maybe in this universe, the Spanish Armada reached England).

Good night, you doomed, sad people.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#70

This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ir…

[dead]

People try to automate-maxxing and forget the Human In The Loop (HITL).

We need the HITL. As opposed to people who think that Human In The Loop Entirely Redundant is better. But it's dangerous.

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