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AI-First Company Memos

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Re: AI-First Company Memos

#111

Post by nilkn »

munk-a wrote: post #109
nilkn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by lando…

A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity. Why would employees enthusiastically respond to a mandate that will provide them with no benefit? Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.

I'm sorry to say this, but the company does not need employees to respond enthusiastically. They'll just replace the people who resist for too long. Employees who resist indefinitely have absolutely zero leverage unless they're working on a small subset of services or technologies where AI coding agents will never be useful (which rules out the vast majority of employed software developers).

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#112

Post by goatlover »

munificent wrote: post #63
CountHackulus wrote: post #51

This reads like they don't want AI, they just want tooling. More, better tooling. AI is just a scapegoat/easy out for writing more tooling that makes them more efficient.

CEOs want productivity. They don't want employees. Employees are a cost center.

Employees also make for customers. Not sure how AIs and robots will be replacing human consumers once CEOs realize their dream.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#113

Post by solidasparagus »

floren wrote: post #84
coldpie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try these things a couple times a month. They're always underwhelming. Earlier this week I had the thing work tells me to use (claude code sonnet 4? something like that) generate some unit tests for a new function I wrote. I had a number of objections about the utility of the test cases it chose to write, but the largest problem was that it assigned the expected value to a test case struct field and then... didn't…

Twice now in this same story, different subthreads, I've seen AI dullards declaring that you, specifically, are holding it wrong. It's delightful, really.

I don't really care if other people want to be on or off the AI train (no hate to the gp poster), but if you are on the train and you read the above comment, it's hard not to think that this person might be holding it wrong.

Using sonnet 4 or even just not knowing which model they are using is a sign of someone not really taking this tech all that seriously. More or less anyone who is seriously trying to adopt this technology knows they are using Opus 4.6 and probably even knows when they stopped using Opus 4. Also, the idea that you wouldn't review the code it generated is, perhaps not uncommon, but I think a minority opinion among people who are using the tools effectively. Also a rename falls squarely in the realm of operations that will reliably work in my experience.

This is why these conversations are so fruitless online - someone describes their experience with an anecdote that is (IMO) a fairly inaccurate representation of what the technology can do today. If this is their experience, I think it's very possible they are holding it wrong.

Again, I don't mean any hate towards the original poster, everyone can have their own approach to AI.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#114

Post by ambicapter »

ryandrake wrote: post #73
steveBK123 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed to…

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

CEOs are ladder climbers. The main skill in ladder climbing is being in tune with what the people around them are thinking, and doing what pleases/maximizes other's approval of the job they are doing.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#115

Post by munk-a »

nilkn wrote: post #111
munk-a wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity. Why would employees enthusiastically respond to a mandate that will provide them with no benefit? Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.

I'm sorry to say this, but the company does not need employees to respond enthusiastically. They'll just replace the people who resist for too long. Employees who resist indefinitely have absolutely zero leverage unless they're working on a small subset of services or technologies where AI coding agents will never be useful (which rules out the vast majority of employed software developers).

Oh, they can certainly do that (in part evidenced by companies doing that). It's a large cost to the company, you'll get attrition and lose a lot of employee good-will, and it'll only pay off if you're right. Going with an optional system by making such tools available and incentivizing their use will dodge both of those issues and let you pivot if the technology isn't as beneficial as you thought.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#116

Post by renewiltord »

People have always resisted change especially one that modifies the way they work. They’d rather work on the same thing for life. To get them to adopt new tools you need to do this stuff.

And yes, people did resist IDEs (“I’m best with my eMacs” - no you weren’t), people resisted the “sufficiently smart compiler”, and so on. What happened was that they were replaced by the sheer growth in the industry providing new people who didn’t have these constraints.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#117

Post by asa400 »

ryandrake wrote: post #73
steveBK123 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed to…

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

It's extremely human behavior. We all do it to some degree or another. The incentives work like this:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's not your fault, because all your peers were doing it too. "Who could have known? Everyone was doing it."
    - If all your peers _aren't_ doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's your fault alone, and your board and shareholders crucify you. "You idiot! What were you thinking? You should have just played it safe with our existing revenue streams."
And the one for what's happening with RTO, AI, etc.:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you _don't do it_ and it _works_, your board crucifies you for missing a plainly obvious sea change to the upside. "You idiot! How did you miss this? Everyone else was doing it!"
Non-founder/mercenary C-suites are incentivized to be fundamentally conservative by shareholders and boards. This is not necessarily bad, but sometimes it leads to funny aggregate behavior, like we're seeing now, when a critical mass of participants and/or money passes some arbitrary threshold resulting in a social environment that makes it hard for the remaining participants to sit on the sidelines.

Imagine a CEO going to their board today and going, "we're going to sit out on potentially historic productivity gains because we think everyone else in the United States is full of shit and we know something they don't". The board responds with, "but everything I've seen on CNBC and Bloomberg says we're the only ones not doing this, you're fired".

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#118

Post by Rover222 »

coldpie wrote: post #95
Rover222 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that the rate of change will only accelerate.

I dunno. At some point the people who make these tools will have to turn a profit, and I suspect we'll find out that 98% of the AI industry is swimming naked.

Yeah I think it'll consolidate around one or two players. Mostly likely Xai, even though they're behind at the moment. No one can compete with the orbital infrastructure, if that works out. Big if. That's all a different topic.

But I feel you, part of me wants to quit too, but can't afford that yet.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#119

Post by RyanOD »

munificent wrote: post #61
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #10

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.

Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines. The latter is wildly more productive than the former. If you owned a business that employed a bunch of cobblers, then moving them all out of their little shops into one big factory where they can produce 100x as many shoes means you just…

Unfortunately, I would expect the boss to say, "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x the shoes to repair".

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#120

Post by strange_quark »

steveBK123 wrote: post #82
ryandrake wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

> Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere I mean.. recent FBI files of certain emails would imply.. probably, yes.

Probably yes? Definitely. See also articles like this one [1]. These guys all run in the same circles and the groupthink gets out of control.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

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