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AI-First Company Memos

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Re: AI-First Company Memos

#131

Post by charcircuit »

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.

>Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous.

This is simply not true. As a counter example consider debuggers. They are a big productivity boost, but it requires the user to change their development practice and learn a new tool. This makes adoption very hard. AI has a similar issue of being a new tool with a learning curve.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#132

Post by palijer »

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.

There was an Apple memo like this though that said they were word processing first.

https://writingball.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-infamous-apple-...

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#133

Post by abtinf »

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 transition took 40-50 years. Electrical power in manufacturing was infeasible for lot of reasons for a longtime.

Any company issuing such an edict early on would have bankrupted themselves. And by the time it became practical, no such edict was needed.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#135

Post by RandallBrown »

charcircuit wrote: post #131
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.

>Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. This is simply not true. As a counter example consider debuggers. They are a big productivity boost, but it requires the user to change their development practice and learn a new tool. This makes adoption very hard. AI has a similar issue of being a new tool with a learning curve.

Did companies actually send out memos saying "We're going to be a company that uses debuggers!"

I would have just thought that people using them would quickly outpace the people that weren't and the people falling behind would adapt or die.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#136

Post by teeklp »

chung8123 wrote: post #90
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?

It is investor sentiment and FOMO. If your investors feel like AI is the answer you will need to start using AI. I am not as negative on AI as the rest of the group here though. I think AI first companies will out pace companies that never start to learn the AI muscle. From my prospective these memos mostly seem reasonable.

I agree that a lot of the current push is driven by investor sentiment and a degree of FOMO. If capital markets start to believe AI is table stakes, companies don’t really have the option to ignore it anymore. That said, I’m not bearish on AI either. I think there’s a meaningful difference between chasing AI for signaling purposes and deliberately building an “AI muscle” inside the organization. Companies that start learning how to use, govern, and integrate AI thoughtfully are likely to outpace those that never engage at all. From that perspective, most of these memos feel fairly reasonable to me. They’re less about declaring AI as a silver bullet and more about acknowledging that standing still carries its own risk.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#137

Post by blibble »

blindriver wrote: post #72
coldpie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.

If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further. I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away fr…

> you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong

> I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025,

> I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years

> there is nothing that is going to stop it.

I need to turn this into one of those checklists like the anti-spam one and just paste it every time we get the same 5 or 6 clichés

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#138

Post by mjr00 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #83
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s simply not true. Developers hand-writing assembly readily adopted compilers, accountants readily adopted spreadsheets, and farmers readily adopted tractors and powered mills.

Your examples are productivity boosters that don't threaten job security. A human has to provide inputs to the compiler, the spreadsheet, and the tractor.

The tractor, or more generally farm automation, was maybe the biggest single destruction of jobs in human history. In 1800 about 65% of people worked in agriculture, now it's about 1%. Even if AI eliminated every single computer programmers' job it would be a drop in the bucket compared to how many jobs farm automation destroyed.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#139

Post by sigseg1v »

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.

"Hey boss, I tried to replace my screwdriver with this thing you said I have to use? Milwaukee or something? When I used it, it rammed the screw in so tight that it cracked the wood."

^ If someone says that they are definitely "holding it wrong", yes. If they used it more they would understand that you use the clutch ring to the appropriate setting to avoid this. What you don't do, is keep using the screwdriver while the business that pays you needs 55 more townhouses built.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#140

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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…

>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.

I wouldn't analogize the adoption of AI tools to a transition from individual craftspeople to an assembly line, which is a top-down total reorganization of the company (akin to the transition of a factory from steam power to electricity, as a sibling commenter noted [0]). As it currently exists, AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the individual level, not a total corporate reorganization. Continuing your analogy, it's more akin to letting craftspeople bring whatever tools they want to work, whether those be hand tools or power tools. If the power tools are any good, most will naturally opt for them because they make the job easier.

>The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.

That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive. Why else would they naturally adopt things like compilers, IDEs, and frameworks? Many workers enjoyed the respective intellectual puzzles of hand-optimizing assembly, or memorizing esoteric key combinations in their tricked-out text editors, or implementing everything from scratch, yet nonetheless jumped at the opportunity to adopt modern tooling because it increased how much they could accomplish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976955

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