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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#31

Post by fzeroracer »

oblio wrote: post #18
donatj wrote: post #9

My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready. Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working w…

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-li... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... (read the bold text in the middle of the article) These articles are 25 years old.

Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or not. If it works it works and there's no need to understand why or how.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#32

Post by pixl97 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #28
drivingmenuts wrote: post #19

As someone who has spent the last 30 years honing my craft (programming), all I can say is this: ha ha!

I've spent 16 years and I won't exactly be cheering if we hit a wall with AI. I love programming, but I also love building things. When I imagine what having an army of mid-level engineers that genuinely only need high level instruction to reliably complete tasks, and don't require raising hundreds of millions while become beholden to some 3rd party, would let me build... I get very excited.

Programming is almost never an objective in itself, it's a stepping stone to some other task. It's nice it pays a good living, but I have a feeling that's going away eventually.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#33

Post by zarmin »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #17
donatj wrote: post #9

My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready. Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working w…

The nephew has no programming knowledge. He wants to build a website that will turn him into a bazillionaire. He asks AI how to solve problem X. AI provides direction, but he doesn't quite know how to ask the right questions. Still, the AI manages to give him a 70% solution. He will go to his grave before he learns enough programming to do the remaining 30% himself, or, understand the first 70%. Delegating to AI isn'…

In the early aughts, I was so adept at navigating my town because I delivered pizza. I could draw a map from memory. My directional skills were A+.

Once GPS became ubiquitous, I started relying on it, and over about a decade, my navigational skills degraded to the point of embarrassment. I've lived in the same major city now for 5 years and I still need a GPS to go everywhere.

This is happening to many people now, where LLMs are replacing our thinking. My dad thinks he is writing his own memoirs. Yeah pop, weird how you and everyone else just started using the "X isn't Y, it's Z" trope liberally in your writing out of nowhere.

It's definitely scary. And it's definitely sinister. I maintain that this is intentional, and the system is working the way they want it to.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#34

Post by keyshapegeo99 »

Animats wrote: post #26

The article as I see it is just one paragraph that end "So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?" Is there more if you're a subscriber to Harvard Business Review?

I had to disable UBO and my VPN's ad blocker. Then the whole piece showed up

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#35

Post by ElevenLathe »

mavamaarten wrote: post #20
theideaofcoffee wrote: post #11

The problem with most corporate work that these managerial idiots want replaced with AI is that is all so utterly useless. Reports written that no one will ever read, presentations made for the sake of the busy-ness of "making a deck", notes and minutes of meetings that should never have taken place in the first place. Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-wr…

So true. We used to appoint someone in the group to take notes. These notes were always correct, to the point, short and easy to read. Now our manager(s) are heavily experimenting with recording all meetings and desperately trying to produce useful reports using all sorts of AI tools. The output is always lengthy and makes the manager super happy. Look, amazing reports! But on closer inspection they're consistently i…

It's their company; we just work at it. If we want to exert more control in the workplace, we obviously need more power in the workplace. In the meantime, if they want the equivalent of their company's prefrontal cortex to be burned out with a soldering iron, that's their prerogative.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#36

Post by cjbgkagh »

ryandrake wrote: post #30

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…

Just make shit up, or even better have the AI make shit up for you

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#37

Post by thatfrenchguy »

ryandrake wrote: post #30

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…

It’s kind of a good way to make your business collapse though, because figuring out the kinds of problems where LLMs are useful and where they’ll destroy your productivity is extremely important

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#38

Post by RobinL »

donatj wrote: post #9

My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready. Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working w…

I largely agree. As a counterpoint, today I delivered a significant PR that was accepted easily by the lead dev with the following approach:

1. Create a branch and vibe code a solution until it works (I'm using codex cli)

2. Open new PR and slowly write the real PR myself using the vibe code as a reference, but cross referencing against existing code.

This involved a fair few concepts that were new to me, but had precedent in the existing code. Overall I think my solution was delivered faster and of at least the same quality as if I'd written it all by hand.

I think its disrespectful to PR a solution you don't understand yourself. But this process feels similar to my previous non-AI assisted approach where I would often code spaghetti until the feature worked, and then start again and do it 'properly' once I knew the rough shape of the solution

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#39

Post by Macha »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #36
ryandrake wrote: post #30

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…

Just make shit up, or even better have the AI make shit up for you

The problem is, the shit that's made up will be used to justify the decision as a success and ensure the methodology continues.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#40

Post by Bukhmanizer »

AlexandrB wrote: post #14

It'll be very funny if any AI productivity gains are balanced by productivity loss due to slop - all the while using massive amounts of electricity to achieve nothing.

I don’t think AI slop is inherently mandatory, but I worry that the narrative around AI will devalue engineering work enough that it becomes impossible to avoid.
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