Appearing productive in the workplace • Hacker News Board

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#611

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

0rbiter wrote: post #570

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…

> review bots Say no more.

Have you actually used them ? They are really good now if you configure them correctly. Code Rabbit catches more bugs than anyone in our main platform - mostly because it gets the first crack but that is still significant time and churn savings. Very low rate of false positives and almost always reasonable questions when they are.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#612

Post by Izkata » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

> Professional formatting, length, and clear prose are no longer indicators of care and work quality (they never were, but in the past, if someone drafts up a twelve page spec, at least you know they care enough to spend a lot of time on it).

On the flipside what was that quote, something like "Sorry for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one"?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#613

Post by e28eta » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

smallmancontrov wrote: post #122

ge96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?

iirc, I saw it all over Stripe documents while I was there from 2017-2020.

Lots of emoji use on Slack, and then it’d show up in requirements docs, shipped emails, etc.

I don’t know where it came from, but that’s where I was exposed to it first.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#614

Post by slumberlust » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

aryehof wrote: post #355

jimbokun wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m too lazy to tell the AI what I want to say, then copy and send its output. I just type what I want to say and hit send. YOLO

> I just type what I want to say and hit send. YOLO Made me smile. Perhaps the new term for making a human hand-written reply is that I didnt use AI … “I YOLOed it”.

I've seen people intentionally commit typos to give it that authenticity nod.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#615

Post by mbrumlow » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

> The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in.

This screams gate keeping.

My self and many who are experts in their fields were never formally trained. The titans that built the world of software we have today were mostly untrained in this specific field.

I think the article completely misses the point. If the artifacts created solve a problem then who cares who wrote the prompt or wrote the code.

Software ha changing, and holding in to old notions, titles, processes and rules to keep your status , title and importance seems silly.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#616

Post by reenorap » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #503

reenorap wrote: post #219

The cope-ism in this blog post is palpable. The author is genuinely offended that someone who doesn't know how to code is daring to invade his turf. It's pretty sad that this is how he is reacting. I, for one, welcome the new paradigm shift of vibe coders entering the field. I still think I have a competitive advantage with my 30+ years of coding experience, but I don't think it's wrong for vibe coders to enter my tu…

Would you have some random bloke with ChatGPT work on and test the electrical wiring in your house? Or would you prefer someone who actually understands what they are doing? What about software that calculates expensive material requirements and cutting? What about medical software that can make decisions about your health? It just sounds like you work on very low stakes software, probably CRUD apps if I had to guess…

You have far too much faith in the existing codebase around the world.

I think at least 80% of programmers are very bad, especially the massive number of contractors from Infosys, Wipro, etc. They are pumping out shit code and they can easily be replaced with a competent programmer with an LLM.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#617

Post by mikeshi42 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

svnt wrote: post #568

mikeshi42 wrote: post #364

While I agree with some of these observations - the research cited in the article really do not match the claims at all from what I can tell. > An NBER study of support agents [2] found generative AI boosted novice productivity by about a third while barely helping experts. Harvard Business School researchers found the same pattern in consulting work [3]. The first work cited was a research study on GPT-3(!) from 202…

These issues align with what I found, and make this other comment more explainable: > Having trouble understanding the final line: > > Also, those that claimed this article is ironically a casualty of it’s own complaint are 100% right, Kudos. > Why would the article be a casualty of its own complaint? The author probably sourced the article using AI; the sources don’t quite align in the way they often don’t when sour…

The irony is when I was sanity checking with ChatGPT - it caught the inaccuracies on its own.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#618

Post by glouwbug » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

callamdelaney wrote: post #586

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…

Developers have been lacking taste for decades anyway, like all of those kubernetes clusters built out for companies that could run on a 50 euro a month dedicated server at hetzner.

Sometimes entire businesses collapse to a python dict and a backup UPS power supply

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#619

Post by reenorap » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

danaw wrote: post #375

reenorap wrote: post #219

The cope-ism in this blog post is palpable. The author is genuinely offended that someone who doesn't know how to code is daring to invade his turf. It's pretty sad that this is how he is reacting. I, for one, welcome the new paradigm shift of vibe coders entering the field. I still think I have a competitive advantage with my 30+ years of coding experience, but I don't think it's wrong for vibe coders to enter my tu…

i too find lots of value in llms but your example describes a scenario a programmer could have also easily solved and maybe even had writing it correctly in the first or second shot. that isn't to say an llm can't be useful but your post implies it's inevitable that llms will replace humans entirely from writing code, which i think is incredibly optimistic at best. that said we will see!

Yes but I forgot to mention that scenario took me seconds as opposed to 30-60 mins total time. And yes, I do believe humans will be mostly removed from writing code. I didn't believe it but now I do.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#620

Post by reenorap » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

danaw wrote: post #373

reenorap wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only seen AI make codebases better, and I'm talking about it making some pretty nuanced changes. I think mass-rewriting of projects is possible these days with AI.

just last week AI led a developer on our team to brick our git history when he was attempting to fix a deploy. he's not a git expert but an llm should of not led him that far astray, no? i see on a weekly basis where if an llm was left to do what its initial direction was without human oversight it would have broken otherwise working programs

Your developer didn't have anyone reviewing the work he was checking in? Or he didn't have the common sense to ask anyone else on the team to verify?