Appearing productive in the workplace • Hacker News Board

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#511

Post by cess11 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:26 AM UTC

uncircle wrote: post #447

yard2010 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally losing the whole process to a stochastic parrot.

They are so far removed from the process they can claim they are any % more productive and no one is able to contradict them. Call it a ‘productivity theatre’ The economic reality check is going to be devastating. It won’t be a crash of AI as a tech, it will be a crash of every ‘AI native’ company that does not even know what is their product any more.

The US reinventing the worst parts of Soviet but putting a glossy and chipper veneer on it.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#512

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:28 AM UTC

tardedmeme wrote: post #475

jeremyjh wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the riskier bets my team is currently making is that this is exactly what is needed, and nearly nothing more. We have LOB prototypes vibe coded by enthusiastic domain experts that we are supporting in a “port and release” fashion. A senior engineer takes the prototype and uses Claude code to generate a reasonable design, do an initial rough port (~80% functional, 100% auth & audit logging) and (hopefully) all…

Is CRUD low stakes? Even if all you do with the employee database is read and write employees, losing it or corrupting it is disastrous, potentially business-ending.

Some of it is, certainly, and those are the ones we’re supporting this way. I’m not talking about systems of record - more like custom project and task coordination systems that would alternatively exist in spreadsheets, in Monday.com or wedged into some larger system that is a poor fit and functions largely through side channels.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#513

Post by Octoth0rpe » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:29 AM UTC

lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago.

Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. I'm not sure how we can create incentives that optimize for finding the 'right' solution, which may be the cheapest (the bash one-liner). Perhaps a widely recognized but not overly optimized for benchmark for this class of problems?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#514

Post by stavros » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:35 AM UTC

lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#515

Post by jurgenburgen » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:39 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #514

lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

How can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#516

Post by ninkendo » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:40 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #212

skirmish wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you just rubber-stamp the lazy work? What else can you do when this PR is assigned to you specifically for reviewing?

Recently I reviewed some vibe-coded stuff and sent a list of issues and suggestions to the “author,” figuring he’d read it and then go through each one with Claude until fixed. Instead he didn’t read it at all, and just threw the whole thing at Claude Code as a big prompt. The result was… interesting!

This is happening with coworkers now. It’s honestly insulting.

They put up a PR with all the obvious tells, the markdown table of files that changed, the description that basically parrots back things the human obviously wanted them to stress in the task (“this implements a secure, tested (no regressions) implementation of a Foo…”), and the code is an absolute mess of one-off functions placed in any random file with no thought to the way the codebase is actually organized.

Then I give feedback after spending like an hour going through their 2000 line change, and then here comes back an update with a very literal interpretation of my feedback that clearly doesn’t really understand what I was even saying. Complete with code comments that parrot back what I said (“// Use the expected platform abstractions for conversion (not bespoke methods”).

Reviewing coworkers PR’s feels like I’m just talking to the LLM directly at this point, but with more steps and I have less control over the output.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#517

Post by bonoboTP » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:41 AM UTC

northernsausage wrote: post #507

bonoboTP wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your company producing? Do you think it's worth being passionate and enthusiastic about? Or is it perhaps reasonable to just do the bare minimum to get a paycheck? People see that it's bullshit anyway and the job doesn't result in any actual positive impact in the world. So why care?

It's a small family run company that turns over multi million on bespoke stone pieces. AI is rotting away at the core of the business from leadership to customer service. I was passionate before the rot, but I've got a new job starting in 5 weeks and I can't wait. Perhaps you are self projecting a little, these people got employed on good wages and have the skills the just don't use them anymore. I hate the future.

Do you have any suspicion of why they are not putting in the effort then? Do you think they think their output is better this way? Or maybe actually they don't really give a damn deep down?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#518

Post by adamtulinius » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:42 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #514

lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

I'm sorry but "extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style" seems to me to be the opposite of throwaway.

It sounds like the kind of thing people will think surely must be very important and in use, because why go through all those hoops instead of doing a quick hack?

But I guess we can just throw AI at the maintenance burden anyways..

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#519

Post by stavros » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:42 AM UTC

jurgenburgen wrote: post #515

stavros wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

How can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?

What expert would build a cli tool to avoid writing a bash one-liner?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#520

Post by stavros » Thu, May 07, 2026, 11:43 AM UTC

adamtulinius wrote: post #518

stavros wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

I'm sorry but "extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style" seems to me to be the opposite of throwaway. It sounds like the kind of thing people will think surely must be very important and in use, because why go through all those hoops instead of doing a quick hack? But I guess we can just throw AI at the maintenance burden anyways..

I agree, so you should ask yourself "why would the expert do this?"

I decided to go for the charitable interpretation of "the alternatives are close enough in functionality that writing by hand is not worth it", instead of the uncharitable interpretation of "these examples are completely made up".