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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#101

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…

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Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#102
post #38
post #9

My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready. Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working w…

I largely agree. As a counterpoint, today I delivered a significant PR that was accepted easily by the lead dev with the following approach: 1. Create a branch and vibe code a solution until it works (I'm using codex cli) 2. Open new PR and slowly write the real PR myself using the vibe code as a reference, but cross referencing against existing code. This involved a fair few concepts that were new to me, but had pre…

The best way I’ve found to use LLM’s for writing anything that matters is, after feeding it the right context, take its output and then retype it in your own words. Then the LLM has helped capture your brain dump and organize it but by forcing yourself to write it rather than copy and paste… you get to make it your own. This technique has worked quite well with domains I’m not the best at yet like marketing copy. I want my shit to have my own voice but I’m not sure what to cover… so let the LLM help me with what to cover and then I can rewrite its work.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about making the productivity metrics go up, even if at the expense of real productivity or common sense. The man who it was named after ironically (unironically?) faked his own metrics

It doesn't seem to even be about making metrics go up. It's about telling a narrative-reinforcing story: That AI is great. It's worth it. Leadership is right to be obsessed with it. I would have thought that in a fight between "fooling ourselves with a story" and "metrics go up" that the metrics would win, but it seems to not be the case.

Same thing happened to work from home. Meta straight up sabotaged the reason for it's own rebrand in service of it.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#104

The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.

The AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?

I've come to appreciate that using AI tools are a skill on it's own. Anything beyond auto code completion takes quite a bit of conscious effort to experiment with and then learn how to delegate to in a workflow. They often end up being valuable, but it did take some work to get out of my productivity 'local maximum' that maybe not everyone would naturally take on.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#106

The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.

Not odd under the theory that they are being done to buy wiggle room to reduce the force later on. They announce the firing and layoff of those who haven't made their forecasted numbers.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#107

The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.

The AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?

Well AI advocates keep insisting that the only reason for someone to not benefit is if they're resistant to change and too lazy to learn.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#108

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…

This must be how conspiracy theorists feel. How could a whole class of people (the professional managerial class) all decide at once that AI was a wonderful too we all must adopt now, and it's all going to make all of us more productive and we're 100% certain about it? It boggles the mind. I'm sure just it's just social contagion, hype, and profit motive, but it definitely feels like a conspiracy sometimes.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#109
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a lovely meeting where a senior "leader" was looking at effort estimates and said "Do these factor in AI-tools? Seems like it should be at least 30% lower if it did." Like I use AI tools, I even like using them, but saying "this tool is so good it will cut our dev time by 30%" should be coming from the developers themselves or their direct manager. Otherwise they are just making figures up and forcing them o…

I was that manager. I dunno about your senior leader but with me it was coming from a healthy place. After a few months of ra-ra from the C suite about how we were now an AI-first company (we're a tech consultancy building one-off stuff for customers) and should be using it in all our customer projects, I asked the question, quite reasonably I thought, "so am I going to offer lower prices to my clients, or am I going…

Another possibility: your teams are working less now.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#110
old flow : send RCA to customer in a timely manner

New flow: please run RCA through chatgpt and forward to your manager who will run it through chat GPT and send to the customer.

RCA is now 10x longer, only 10% accurate, and took 3x longer to get to the customer.

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