Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 298 posts

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

#251

Post by qznc »

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.

Yes, they confuse development with manufacturing/assembly.

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

#252

Post by atoav »

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…

I don't know who needs to hear this, but: shipped code ia a liability too.

Shipped code can fail. Shipped code can corrupt or delete production data. Shipped code can break your customers trust. Shipped code can lead to literal court cases. Shipped code can force hasty fixes and all nighters.

Some people can afford to yolo their code others can't. Maybe me having programmed for expensive hardware that punches a hole into a brick wall, burns up in a cloud of smoke or hurts people if you make a mistake has to do with the fact that I know.

The LLM won't go to jail for certain things. The one who signed of on the code may.

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

#253

Post by aryehof »

chrisss395 wrote: post #50
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…

It's good to know your experience mirrors mine. Developers are moving faster, but the rest of the organization is holding them back because processes and decisions still rely on other parts of the org. Has anyone else observed the same? Organizations "born in AI" appear to buck this trend for obvious reasons (no legacy org. to deal with). My two cents.

I think while developers are moving faster, they are moving more dangerously. Perhaps the rest of the organization holding them back is a good thing?

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

#254

Post by SiempreViernes »

sanderjd wrote: post #172
dakiol wrote: post #126

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?" AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop…

Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?

If it really does make your job easier that's great for you, but if it isn't making you more profitable then the company as a whole is wasting money and some people will have to go until your job is about as stressful as before.

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

#255

Post by Roark66 »

In the current "big co" I'm working for it's a bit ridiculous.

While AI tools have been provided pretty quickly (over a year ago, I initially used gemini cli, then copilot once it added anthropic models) the management is absolutely clueless about it.

The top wants agents. Every team is asked few times a week "what autonomous agents will you build next" and answers the current AI lacks agency required not to mess up critical long running tasks and generate even more work are falling on deaf ears.

(also ideas such as, why don't we setup a wiki page were teams can post their repetitive tasks and we can use AI to script them, are considered "not fast enough" - just build it... but we are the automation team, we automated everything we do years ago :-)

Middle managers on the other hand suddenly started giving juniors senior's work and asking seniors "tell them (juniors) how to prompt it".

Seriously? How about I prompt it myself instead? Oh, but it makes a shit load of architectural errors and boobie traps the junior will fail to find... So now instead of a cursory glance I have to spend an hour reviewing a small PR from them.

And any questions about "why are you creating a new X for this instead of extending the existing one?" are met with blank panicked stares...

The essence of this BS is contained in my description of the recent "Copilot Review" incident.

We sometimes merge the same Github workflow files (10 line files) to dozens of repos, we have to obtain approvals for the PRs from a bunch of teams working in different timezones, but the merge has to be done everywhere at once and it has to be coordinated with other work.

As we were on a day of such task some "helpful hand" enabled Copilot PR reviews for the whole org.

Copilot helpfully opened 7 or 8 discussions on each PR giving us such precious advice as "your concurrency group uses the commit sha as a differentiating factor, this will allow multiple runs to proceed concurrently" to which one is tempted to answer "no shit sherlock".

We suddenly had almost 200 conversations to "resolve" an hour before the merge and a bunch of approvers didn't give their approvals because "there is a discussion".

Thankfully we had copilot that wrote us a script in 5 minutes to resolve the problem caused by itself...

Maybe our next overnight agent can go over all our open PRs and close Copilot Review conversations with appropriate messages?

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

#256

Post by bendergarcia »

ravenstine wrote: post #66
anonymars wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your thoughts on open source? Seems like the same problem writ large

I love open source, but you are correct in identifying it as a very similar problem, though it's more a problem with software licensing than source code being publically available. Usually the argument is made that FOSS ends up as free labor, which is true in a lot of ways, but I see FOSS devaluing software as a whole. When software is open and libre, that sends a psychological signal that the software isn't that val…

The entire internet is built on open source software. Oss didn’t send a signal of invaluable. What!?

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

#257

Post by jorisw »

Henchman21 wrote: post #130
dgellow wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mythical Man Month should really be a mandatory reading for anyone working in software… and I don’t mean reading a Claude summary

I asked who hadn’t read that in an engineering meeting recently. No one had heard of it. Now, I have been in tech for my entire life. That book was given to me in 1993 as I was just starting out in college. NO ONE in my meeting was familiar with the title or author. I felt a little more impending doom upon realizing that.

Does everyone need to have read it though, in order to understand its premise?

Surely they were at least aware of the basic premise that adding people doesn’t necessarily speed up delivery?

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

#258

Post by pseudohadamard »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #144
SoftTalker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> In software, the factory line is nothing but cp or httpd

Little-known fact, cp is actually an AI. I trained my cp AI on a copy of the gcc source code and asked it to write me a C compiler and it did! It was so accurate it even managed to reproduce gcc's bugs and quirks.

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

#259

Post by zanderz »

jorisw wrote: post #257
Henchman21 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked who hadn’t read that in an engineering meeting recently. No one had heard of it. Now, I have been in tech for my entire life. That book was given to me in 1993 as I was just starting out in college. NO ONE in my meeting was familiar with the title or author. I felt a little more impending doom upon realizing that.

Does everyone need to have read it though, in order to understand its premise? Surely they were at least aware of the basic premise that adding people doesn’t necessarily speed up delivery?

An analogy I saw once: can 9 women make a baby in 1 month?

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

#260

Post by eloisant »

dakiol wrote: post #126

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?" AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop…

They're not innovations like TCP/IP, Linux or Postgres, they're innovations like compilers, syntax highlighting, and IDEs.
Post reply on HN