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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

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Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#141

Post by thisisit »

highfrequency wrote: post #114
thisisit wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My larger enterprise world today AI adoption seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose. And because they know my management freezes whenever there are whispers of "our CFO said so" they even paraded that reasoning - "our CFO "tested" Lovable and he is convinced and asking us to vibe code the…

What’s wrong with the finance team (vibe) coding a janky prototype for planning?

Because the next email is going to be "we demoed the app to our CEO and he loved it and he wants it in production". I have never seen the team back down from their ideas.

And also, I have been in similar sounding scenarios multiple times. They talk big when everything is going smoothly and nothing is on the line. The day shit hits the fan, they will furiously message me on Teams and insist that I support them in finding out issues. So far it has been about mostly about shitty design choices. This is at whole new level. They want to vibe code an app which will be used to plan and guide company's direction for the next year.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#142

Post by [deleted] »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #76
olsondv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not have been clear. My job is not AI development. I have features to deliver. The ask from employer is to add the AI knowledge sharing on top of it. They don’t pay for that. When layoffs come, it wouldn’t save me from missed deliverables.

I refuse to use LLMs and don't have a job, so I'm just some guy. What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. This attitude of "your job is to deliver value for the customer, anything else is a distraction, and if you share your hard-earned value-delivery techniques with others then you…

[deleted]

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#143

Post by samothrace »

kj4211cash wrote: post #51
pards wrote: post #7

In my large enterprise world, AI adoption hasn't made it outside of the development teams - only developers have access to Github Copilot. Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production. Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. AI makes these post-development bottlenecks w…

We have a "two timelines" approach going on and I'm curious if others are seeing the same. There are official "Engineering-supported" services. There development speed is not the bottleneck. Engineers demand clean requirements that take forever to show up. Testing and deployment scheduling also take forever post-development. Important people are so fed-up that they've started hiring people to vibe code and develop se…

Sounds like your company has bad or missing business analysts and/or product owners. Someone's supposed to be working between the stakeholders and engineering to develop those requirements and commit resources for testing. These "important people" are re-inventing the wheel and will be mired just as bad or worse until they figure this out.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#144

Post by Brian_K_White »

SoftTalker wrote: post #137
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which isn't to say that most software development isn't woefully ineff…

"We make software just like how Ford makes cars". People who say this kind of thing probably have no idea how Ford makes cars either. The assembly line is the last step. All the research, design, engineering, and testing happens before any sheet metal is stamped out. So the comparison might be more true than not, but unknowingly.

It's not true at all. In software, the factory line is nothing but cp or httpd and neither costs nor produces any value. In cars, the factory line both costs and produces all the value.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#145

Post by netrap »

c-linkage wrote: post #93
ravenstine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else bein…

In my place of employment, anything I create while on company time or using company resources is the property of my employer. So while it might be nice to say I won't share, boss-man can certainly make it so I must share.

It's not about that, it's about the incentive...

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#146

Post by SoftTalker »

ravenstine wrote: post #32
olsondv wrote: post #6

The post hits the nail on the head with the messy middle. There is simply no motivation to develop this sort of intelligence loop as a dev who has their own responsibilities which their job depend on. Management can ask as nicely as they want, but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free. I might share a tool if it’s useful. All the learning of how to wrangle AI or set…

It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else bein…

> I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier

I mean, according to your employment agreement, that code is owned by your employer, since you wrote it as an employee for use at work. They could easily demand that you share it, if they knew it existed.

This just illustrates that smart people figure out their own productivity/time-saving shortcuts at work, and little scripts and tools like this are part of it. Happens all the time. Other employees don't, and just plod through whatever manual process they were trained to do.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#147

Post by dogleash »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #62
i_think_so wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure this is the best idea I've ever heard of for this technology. You should build that tool and it should become mandatory throughout the tech world. Can we get some enabling legislation? A UN resolution perhaps?

Despite the snark I’ll engage. The “get an immediate agent answer then a human expert’s fast-follow” is I think a great idea for many domains - imagine if you could get legal advice this way; the agent will have already explained the basics and the human expert just has to provide corrections - way less typing by humans. Also, the corrections are now documented and could become future grounding for the agent.

> The “get an immediate agent answer then a human expert’s fast-follow” is I think a great idea for many domains

So, like what already happens when my boss asks claude something and I have to pick up the pieces. Except now it's everything he slops about the topic, not just the ones we discuss later?

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#148

Post by nradov »

daheza wrote: post #116
thfuran wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. I think this is probably going to happen at the same time that the providers start really jacking up token prices to extract all the value they can.

I'm a manager and the VPs are starting to ask - how many story points are we getting with AI now. Now we do story points = number of days to implement. (I know this is not real agile but just assume you are in the same position) I can't answer that question but plenty of other managers are fully ready to just give bogus numbers. For my team, use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost. The coding part of the st…

When management starts tracking improvements in story point productivity then the agile teams inflate their story point estimates. Sometimes this involves splitting user stories in ways that don't really make sense from a customer perspective just for the sake of having a place to tack on more points.

And I'm not opposed to using story points, they have some utility within an agile team or program. They just aren't a valid way of quantifying productivity changes.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#150

Post by JohnMakin »

sandeepkd wrote: post #139
JohnMakin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prototypes/mvp's often become the production version

This seems to be the default path which is encouraged/suggested lately, only happy path until you acquire customers

I think it’s fairly normal at least in my career - rush to ship something, lots of “we’ll polish this later,” two years go by, get called into vp/cto/whoever’s office when the debt comes calling like “what the fuck why is this like this???” and I have to say “that ‘later’ we decided is now I guess”
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