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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#571

Post by filoeleven »

wincy wrote: post #368
randycupertino wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go through this with my vendor budgets and contract negotiations right now. We are encouraged to put all their proposals in AI and have it refute each point. I know for a fact they are putting my negotiations in their own AI and having it counter-propose my points. It's an arms race of my AI fighting against their AI. Where does it end.

It’s the Red Queen’s Race, where we all run as fast as we can to stay in exactly the same place.

If You Don't Know What You're Doing, Do It Faster

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#572

Post by khaledh »

maxsilver wrote: post #538
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’ Even ignoring token costs, there’s a high incentive for LLMs to generate complex solutions, because those solutions ge…

This reminds me off this famous quote by Tony Hoare:

    "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#573

Post by aejm »

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…

I agree completely with your sentiment. The word I use to describe it is “quality”! Most people don’t produce quality work or take pride in it, even beyond the tech industry. I believe the tool of AI is exasperating an underlying problem

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#574

Post by svnt »

zkmon wrote: post #542
tovej wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it backwards. Why is profit a goal? It's nolever a goal in and of itself, it can only ever be an instrumental goal. "With profits, we can achieve ". If profit is the main goal of all economic activity, then we are doomed to destroy humanity and the environment.

Profit is the main goal of all economic activity. Economy is an activity of making and moving money around, which is only possible if you make profit.

But this only makes profit the root goal of a certain class of economy, not the actual root goal.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#575

Post by groos »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #378
groos wrote: post #272

As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.

That’s entirely on you. You can take the time to understand it before moving on to the next task. I say this with sympathy and understanding.

You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#576

Post by parliament32 »

red_hare wrote: post #332
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 for an "AI-native" company now and have found this to be the case. EVERYONE (engineers, pms, managers, sales) uses Claude Code to read and write Google Docs (google workspace mcp). Ideas, designs, reports. It's too much for one person to read and, with a distributed async team, there's an endless demand for more. So for every project there's always one super Google Doc with 50 tabs and everyone just points the…

Everyone cranks out endless pages of slop, that everyone else then has to ingest. Anthropic collects a fee from all of you and is the only winner here.

I'm looking forward to the impending crash when the AI providers actually start charging what it costs to run these models. It's going to be a bloodbath, and it's going to be cathartic as fuck.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#577

Post by LtWorf »

htrp wrote: post #80
proofofcontempt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.

Was the CTO advocating a more measured approached to ai adoption?

I have a feeling that I have witnessed it, although I was told the CTO decided to move on to other challenges.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#578

Post by pjc50 »

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…

>> 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.

This phrasing made me think of Baudrillard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation , in particular "Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original".

The AI produces something that is statistically similar to what it was asked for. A copy, through the weights, of some text selected from all the text it was trained on. A simulacra of good work.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#579

Post by SoftTalker »

watwut wrote: post #500
SoftTalker wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With rubrics, or more simply the teacher could hand out an example essay at the start of the year that conveys the style and level of detail they are looking for when they assign an essay. Then they can refer to that when they make an assignment. Implicitly that gives a word count or number of pages, but allows for marking down for "too much repetition" or "needs more detail"

The ambiguous "needs more detail" thing would lead to a lot of students making it too brief in good faith, too long in good faith and both be frustrated and angry. You can write really good mini essay on a topic. And you can write really good super long essay on the same topic. Demanding that students mind read is not a good strategy. Specifying expected length, checking for it is a good strategy. Teacher should also…

A good rubric would remove a lot of this ambiguity.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#580

Post by jerojero »

thfuran wrote: post #558
whazor wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the model space is too competitive. People will switch if another model is significantly better.

There are only a few frontier models, and aren’t they all operating under the same incentives?

Open source models maybe not necessarily as they can (in theory) be self hosted.

I think right now the incentives of open source chinese model developers is to provide good (comparable to SotA) and cheap models so the space is not captured by a few private american companies because they've seen how hard it is to compete in the space when that happens.

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