Appearing productive in the workplace • Hacker News Board

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#341

Post by bertylicious » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:50 AM UTC

LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #92

funimpoded wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing wor…

AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill. I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement. It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people…

Could you please show us an example of the change made to one of these if statements? I'm curious, because it seems absolutely wild to me to end up in such a situation (where that many changes are required and the usual refactoring tools of modern IDEs are insufficient) in the first place.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#342

Post by danaw » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:58 AM UTC

Merad wrote: post #186

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

> intelligent autocomplete I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or bro…

perhaps it depends on language or domain but for me it's usually a minimum of 50% but often 80% what in looking for (lots of web off like typescript, svelte, cloudflare workers, tailwind etc).

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#343

Post by danaw » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

anthonypasq wrote: post #148

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

people have been making some version of this comment for the past three years, and the only thing that has changes is that you keep adding capabilities. 2 years ago people were saying it was purely autocomplete and enhanced google. AI bears just continue to eat shit year after year and keep pretending they didnt say that AI would never be capable of what its currently capable of.

i'll bite. the uses for llms i've described are about what i've been using them for since chatgpt 3o. they've absolutely gotten better since then but i still find them to be very poor replacements for humans, esp in regards to architectural direction. they're very useful assistants tho

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#344

Post by reverius42 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #278

zbentley wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally fair, but 42 if-statements across 32 files isn't something you need to fix with like ... a grand refactor or hexagonal architecture or event sourcing or whatever the overengineering pattern du jour is. You can fix that with a utility function or three, and a file/class/module/whatever that owns the code relating to some of those conditions. I'm not some DRY zealot, but I've been in the "this system needs real…

Sure but even wiring that utility function in is work :D If you have even just a 2-3-million LoC codebase, not even something truly enormous - making global changes does require typing, and a whole lot of it...

If you have a codebase that big, can you even fit enough of it into a context window for the LLM to make correct and meaningful changes across all of it? Admittedly I've only used LLM-based coding for smaller projects.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#345

Post by danaw » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #228

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

Even generating a first-pass of the eventual production code that you can step back and review is useful to get ideas, so long as you guard yourself against laziness of going with the first answer it provides

100%. even having them come up with a few very different competing solutions can be really valuable to explore the problem space

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#346

Post by daveevad » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176

wcfrobert wrote: post #42

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifact…

I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.) So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text. Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive was…

I'll argue there's potentially a standards based advantage at the end when this all shakes out.

It will probably take a couple hundred years but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this :)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#347

Post by danaw » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:06 AM UTC

wg0 wrote: post #268

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

This is one of the most insightful comment I've read on the subject in a a while minus the code review. All the described use cases are good enough for AI except code review which is hit or miss. But agentic coding is a snake oil.

appreciate the compliment!

i don't see llm code review as any kind of code review replacement; more as a backstop to catch things a human might miss (like today an llm caught an unimplemented feature in a POC that would have otherwise been easy for a human to miss)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#348

Post by imp0cat » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

proofofcontempt wrote: post #149

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

I'm with you on all apart from code review. Our team has tried a couple tools. Most of the issues highlighted are either very surface level or non-issues. When it reviews code from the less competent team members, it misses deeper issues which human review has caught, such as when the wrong change has been made to solve a problem which could be solved a better way. Our manager uses it as evidence to affirm his bias t…

Don't give up on the automated code review entirely though, the models and prompts are getting better every day.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#349

Post by danaw » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

rprend wrote: post #328

danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

the most productive teams will be the ones that treat code as compiler output (which we never read) legacy manual codebases which require human review will be the new "maintaining a FORTRAN mainframe". they'll stick around for longer than you'd expect (because they still work) , at legacy stagnant engineering companies

i disagree because i see code as the actual product of the thought behind it. it is after all a description of the intent of the programmer and programming language are what we use to communicate to machines

that said, we will see over the next few years who is right!

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#350

Post by dnnddidiej » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

rogerrogerr wrote: post #294

dnnddidiej wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard this done on LinkedIn which is heavily botted. Did you do this with a real work chat though?

Yeah, guy was being way too obvious about it and someone needed to give him an adjustment.

He needed his weights adjusted.