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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

#291

Post by mattmcknight »

zbentley wrote: post #188
mattmcknight wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"release train" ... "learn how to ship software faster" SAFe is poison.

What do release trains have to do with SAFe? I've worked in a few places that have the notion of a release train (roughly a mutex for "changes being shipped and a burn-in window afterwards" plus some optional batching of changes based on risk level or urgency). Only one of them even gave lip service to SAFe; others had different methodologies/levels of devops for releases/"Agile"-ness (whatever that means). Release t…

> What do release trains have to do with SAFe?

An Agile Release Train (ART) in SAFe is a long-lived, cross-functional "team of teams" (typically 50–150 people) that plans, commits, and delivers value together on a synchronized, fixed-schedule cadence.

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

#292

Post by recursive »

sanderjd wrote: post #246
recursive wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually useful for me. But I still use it anyway.

The total opposite thing :)

Oh right. Along those lines sometimes I do long hand multiplication or division instead of using a calculator. I think it's a valuable skill. If I don't do it, I'll probably forget how.

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

#293

Post by ravenstine »

AngryData wrote: post #216
c-linkage wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They can't force you to share what they don't know about or don't understand.

Exactly. I get why multiple people are replying that my company owns what I make on their time, but it's honestly funny as hell to me that people think most management at any company cares about or understands some CLI tool enough that they would know about it in the first place or actually go through the effort to force one to hand it over. That's gotta be really rare. Being concerned about that is like being afraid drive through a red light at an empty intersection when you're the only car on the road at 3am.

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

#294

Post by sanderjd »

recursive wrote: post #292
sanderjd wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total opposite thing :)

Oh right. Along those lines sometimes I do long hand multiplication or division instead of using a calculator. I think it's a valuable skill. If I don't do it, I'll probably forget how.

Yep! But if I were doing my job as an accountant, I would not spend time doing any of that work using long hand division, I would use a spreadsheet. To me, it's a professionalism thing. If I'm doing a job, I should use the best tool (for me) for that job. (edit: I'm absolutely not suggesting that you are unprofessional! It sounds like AI tools are not the best tool for the job, for you. But they are for me, at the moment.) If I'm doing a hobby or personal development in general, then I can use whatever tools I want for that.

It's interesting though, for a long time I said that if I were going to do a personal programming project I was excited about, I would write all the code by hand, because I do really miss doing that, and I also worry about forgetting how to. But now I'm not so sure. I find my daydreaming about personal projects to be a lot more focused on the outcome than the process, lately. More like "wow, I could do so much in an hour or two a day now! think of the possibilities!" than an excitement about writing code and creating pleasant abstractions.

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

#295

Post by dgellow »

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.

Funny to see it on the front page today! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48046436

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

#296

Post by dgellow »

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?

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

Yes, it isn't a long read. You can reduce the book into one sentence if you want but that's a very low resolution understanding of the discussion at hand. Why is adding people not speeding up? Assuming that's true, what can be done about it? Why people still believe that adding more people will actually be beneficial?

Also, it's just generally a good read. Engaging with nuance is essential IMHO, in a world where AI is incentivizing us to summarize everything

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

#297

Post by simoncion »

fallpeak wrote: post #86
simoncion wrote: post #10

> There is another pressure building underneath all this. AI usage will become more visibly metered. The current enterprise feeling of “everyone has access, don’t worry too much about the bill” will not hold forever, at least not in the form people are getting used to. ... > I do not want to make this a cost panic story, that would be the least interesting way to think about “rented intelligence”. The question is not…

Tokens _are_ as cheap as keystrokes. A single keypress by a full-time SWE averages out to $0.005-$0.02 (depending on typing speed and TC). The relationship is obscured because the keystrokes are usually part of a fixed-price subscription plan but they absolutely have a cost. Prior to AI this was in fact a large reason everyone pontificated about concise programming languages and elegantly factoring problems and DRY a…

> Tokens _are_ as cheap as keystrokes.

extremely loud incorrect buzzer

I can set up a drinking-bird-style device to press keys on a keyboard. My per-year operational cost is the same whether or not the bird presses keys.

Programmer time costs money. Nearly all of a programmer's time is spent understanding the system being maintained, the reasons for its existence, and the reasons for the proposed changes to it. If you're honestly such a fool as to think that DRY, "elegant" [0] design, and related things are about reducing the number of keys pressed rather than the time spent understanding the system and how to change it, then... well, I think you make an awfully good "AI Booster".

[0] Read as "easy to reason about, once you understand the core concepts"

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

#298

Post by TallGuyShort »

thfuran wrote: post #284
tardedmeme wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only matters if your employer cares enough to choose to create negative consequences for you. I guarantee almost no employer cares about your vim configuration technically being their IP. Even the lawyer work to figure out if it's their IP or not costs more than any possible gain they could have from claiming it. If your employer is extremely spiteful, they might burn a pile of cash to hurt you. But that's not n…

Or in the situation described >it got checked into the repository and now the script they used at their last job too has their current job's copyright notice and license on it, and they're perceived as being petty for trying to claw back their own intellectual property Where someone is causing a fuss trying to claim ownership of something they never actually owned and thinking the other people are the ones being unre…

Actually every time I've seen something like what I've described above it pre-dated that person's current employment.
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