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AI-First Company Memos

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Re: AI-First Company Memos

#121

Post by LPisGood »

frizlab wrote: post #97
munificent wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup. It’s what I’ve come to realize. My job is probably safe, as long as I will be willing to adapt. I have still not even tried AI once, and don’t care for it, but I know at one point I probably will have to. I don’t actually think it’ll be a productivity boost the way I work. Code has never been the difficult part, but I’ll definitely have to show I have included AI in my workflow to be left alone. Oh well…

Why have you never even _tried_ it? It’s very easy to try and surely you are somewhat curious.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#122

Post by driverdan »

Rover222 wrote: post #22
upupupandaway wrote: post #6

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…

I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.

Fall behind what? Writing code is only one part of building a successful product and business. Speed of writing code is often not what bottlenecks success.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#123

Post by coldpie »

solidasparagus wrote: post #113
floren wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Yeah, I'm definitely guilty of not being motivated to use these tools. I find them annoying and boring. But my company's screaming that we should be using them, so I have been trying to find ways to integrate it into my work. As I mentioned, it's mostly not been going very well. I'm just using the tool the company put in front of me and told me to use, I don't know or really care what it is.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#124

Post by nitwit005 »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #55
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.

On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.

That's a choice individual employees couldn't make. Or, at least, one management wouldn't let them make. It'd require a huge amount of spending.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#125

Post by nitwit005 »

jezzamon wrote: post #44
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.

Productive output is a lagging indicator. Using AI tools is theoretically leading???

I had you a power tool, and your productivity goes up immediately. Your IDE highlights problems, same story. Everyone can observe that this has happened.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#126

Post by _slih »

The Klarna reversal is the most honest thing on this list. Went all in, quality dropped, hired humans back. Every other memo on here is still in the 'we declared victory' phase. Be interesting to check back in a year and see how many quietly walk it back without a blog post

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#127

Post by lokimedes »

The trap for many companies is that as everyone automate with AI, their competitive advantage erodes, as they prove that a few centralized models can run the businesses.

What are the trenches in businesses in 2030, purely ownership over physical assets and energy?

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#128

Post by nitwit005 »

nilkn wrote: post #57
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.

People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.

You have to remember that our trade is automating things. We're all enthusiasts about automating things, and there's very clearly a lot of enthusiasm about using AI for that purpose.

If anything, the problem is that management wants to automate poorly. The employees are asked to "figure it out", and if they give feedback that it's probably not the best option, that feedback is rejected.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#129

Post by emp17344 »

Rover222 wrote: post #71
collingreen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment

It's not obvious because the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team. Which yeah is scary, but my point is if you don't see any multiplier effect from using that latest AI tools, you are either doing a bad job of using them (or don't have the budget, can't blame anyone for that), or are maybe in some obscure niche coding world?

>the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team

This simply isn’t how economics works. There is always additional demand, especially in the software space. Every other productivity-boosting technology has resulted in an increase in jobs, not a decrease.

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