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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

#41

Post by netcan »

Path dependencies between invention and utilization... are complicated and hard to fathom.

Our mental models of developments like the industrial revolution, literacy, printing or suchlike tend to be a lot more straightforward than how things play out in practice.

When a bottleneck is eliminated... you tend to shortly find the next bottleneck.

Meanwhile, there is an underlying assumption everyone seems to make that "more software, more value" is the basic reality. But... I'm skeptical.

To do lists, wishlists, buglists and road maps may be full of stuff but...

Visa or Salesforce have already exploited all their immediate "more software, more money" opportunities.

The ones in a position to easily leverage AI are upstarts. They're starting with nothing. No code. No features. No software. With Ai, presumably, they can produce more software and make value.

Also... I think overextended market rationalism leads people to see everything as an industrial revolution...which irl is much more of an exception.

The networked personal computing revokution put a pc one every desk. It digitized everything. Do we have way better administration for less cost? Not really. Most administrations have grown.

Did law fundamentally change dues to dugital efficiency? No. Not really.

If you work on a terrible enterprise codebase... it's very possible that software quality/quantity isn't actually that important to your organization.

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

#42

Post by alaudet »

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 sadly have to agree with this. In a collaborative "give and take" world sharing is good. In an environment that takes only, all you have left is your own intellectual property. It is your own most vital asset worth protecting. Shouldn't be like this, but it is.

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

#43

Post by dominictorresmo »

It's just ass to work in this area now. In the company I work, the bosses let everyone use it, even non-developers. I really want to quit and work in another area but unfortunately where I live a beginning salary can't pay a rent and I'm getting old

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

#44

Post by thfuran »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #37
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…

> 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…

>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.

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

#45

Post by lxgr »

forinti wrote: post #35
embedding-shape wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Large enterprises need to learn how to ship software faster They haven't even learned that "less code is better" yet, I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for them to suddenly learn "more advanced" things like that before they learn the basics.

More code means more support and more maintenance. If your team is already overloaded or if it's going to be reduced because of AI, things are going to get tough.

My bigger concern is actually that, if a company isn't careful, the bloat (complexity, amount of code, other artifacts etc.) will just balloon and largely cancel out any gains.

Feedback is often only considered once something is already on fire (financially, functionally, or literally).

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

#46

Post by thfuran »

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…

>but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free.

If your employer is expecting that you selflessly share your time for free, you’re getting fucked. Most people are paid to do their job. They are, of course, then expected to work for their employers while on the clock.

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

#48

Post by skydhash »

b112 wrote: post #15
rob74 wrote: post #4

One more point I noticed: since AI adoption is being promoted by companies, collaboration between developers could suffer. Why wait for a more experienced developer to have the time to explain some aspect of the codebase to you (and at the same time confess your ignorance), when AI can do it right away in a competent-sounding way (and most of the time it will probably be right, too)?

I think you hit the nail on the head, it's probably right, most of the time. Or, maybe 89% right, 91% of the time. The more I use AI, the more I see mistakes. I've noticed others see these same mistakes, correct them, then when queried say "Oh, it gets it right all of the time!". No, having to point out "you got this wrong, re-write that last bit" isn't "getting it right". And it's not that the code is wrong overtly,…

I’ve noticed that when I was implementing a build pipeline for a project. My changes introduced a runtime bug (I only tested that the thing was building), but then another developer broke the pipeline while fixing the runtime bug. While it was a failure of mine to introduce the runtime bug, I don’t think I can publish a fix for a bug without investigating why a bug appeared in the first place. Because code is all about assumptions and contracts, and if something that was working break, that means something else has changed and you need to be aware of it.

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

#49

Post by i_think_so »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25
rogerthis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already happens here. I am old dev who was the goto guy for people with certain business and technical questions. Not anymore (which is part good, as I'm interrupted much less, and part bad, as sometimes they regard the wrong answer as truth).

You could vibe yourself up an AMA tool where people can submit questions, an agent goes to work on them, then the question and agent answer sit in a queue waiting for you to provide a review and give your weigh-in.

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?

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

#50

Post by chrisss395 »

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.

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