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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#671

Post by ntcho »

tedggh wrote: post #411

I have to produce a great deal of documentation at work for our customers, most of it regulatory and compliance assessments. Some of the sources I need to use come from agencies in the government or working with the government and are often over a thousand pages long. So AI has been incredibly helpful here because a lot of what I need to do is map this huge bureaucratic set of guidelines and policies to each customer…

I landed on a similar workflow. I found letting agents navigate / self-update docs on a repo full of markdown files quite successful

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#672

Post by ozozozd »

mehdix wrote: post #666
isityettime wrote: post #606

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. “There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.h...

Reminded me of The Tao of Programming [1]. Fantastic little read that brightened my morning (during a boring meeting). [1]: https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

Love this!

> The Master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices. > > "The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant," said the Master. > > "Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice. > > "It is," came the reply. > > "Is the Tao in a video game?" asked the novice. > > "It is even in a video game," said the Master. > > "Is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?" asked the novice. > > The Master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson is over for today," he said.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#673

Post by vldx »

slumberlust wrote: post #614
aryehof wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

TFA actually does this; “relevent” at the disclaimer in the end, so I assumed it’s that authenticity nod.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#674

Post by sevenseacat »

kristjansson wrote: post #138
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). I feel the loss of this signal acutely. It’s an adjustment to react to 10-30 page “spec” choc-a-block with formatting and ascii figures as if it were a verbal spitball … because…

and there's no longer any difference between the 'hey here's an idea I had' document and the 'this has undergone a lot of review and has been signed off by all of the stakeholders' document. Which one do you take as canon that can't be changed, and which not? When it all looks like the same AI slop

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#675

Post by sevenseacat »

stefan_ wrote: post #430
mediaman wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it likely performed well in A/B preference tests with chat users. I've noticed Claude does far fewer listicles than ChatGPT. I suspect that they don't blindly follow supervised learning feedback from chats as much as ChatGPT. I get Apple vs Google design approach from those two companies, in that Apple tends not to obsess over interaction data, instead using design principles, while Google just tests everythi…

There was a time when also Claude would absolutely fill code with emojis, which is why now their system prompt has > Claude does not use emojis unless the person in the conversation asks it to

and it doesn't even follow its own instructions

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#676

Post by sevenseacat »

a34729t wrote: post #654
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…

One of the top 4 ICS in my (major, public) company just posed a 100 lines of AI slop (which I and others read, and found to be meaningless) in a conversation about a major pain point where they are supposed to be the expert. It's like people have totally turned off their brains.

I've seen pure LLM output used in performance reviews. It's wild.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#677

Post by sevenseacat »

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…

> POCs: llms can be good at generating a variety of approaches to a problem that can then be used as inspiration for a more thoughtfully built solution

They really can. But then the head honchos are like "why are you spending so much time on the project when it's already done?"

As the saying goes, I've never seen a prototype that didn't end up in production.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#679

Post by emoII »

itemize123 wrote: post #301
groos wrote: post #273

During the last few months when AI usage was mandated in our team and usage exploded, our team's throughput has barely changed. Now, if this was due to people working 2 hours a day and painting, cooking and playing golf the rest of the day, this would be a great result, but I see many people work past 6pm, and yet the output is mostly the same. We are not tackling harder problems or fixing more bugs despite authoring…

what would you say the disconnect was? Was it a simple case of that your teams' not comfortable with merging AI code?

Well if knowing what to build is still the moat, then at least someone knowing that that was _actually_ built is still super important, no?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#680

Post by danaw »

reenorap wrote: post #619
danaw wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you mean typing characters, maybe

if you mean that business people will just prompt llms to build and run their businesses, that's a fantasy

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