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AI-First Company Memos

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Re: AI-First Company Memos

#71

Post by Rover222 »

collingreen wrote: post #52
Rover222 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.

The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment

It's not obvious because the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team. Which yeah is scary, but my point is if you don't see any multiplier effect from using that latest AI tools, you are either doing a bad job of using them (or don't have the budget, can't blame anyone for that), or are maybe in some obscure niche coding world?

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#72

Post by blindriver »

coldpie wrote: post #58
actionfromafar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :) Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)

> Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.

If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further.

I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#73

Post by ryandrake »

steveBK123 wrote: post #19
upupupandaway wrote: post #6

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed to…

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#74

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

upupupandaway wrote: post #36
steveBK123 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. They heard from their golf buddy who heard from his racquetball buddy that this other CTO at this other shop is saving lots of money with AI

I know you're speaking half in jest but the C-suite of my area actually used a tweet by an OpenAI executive as the agenda for an AI brainstorm meeting.

It'll never cease to amaze me how many powerful people can't tell advice from advertising.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#75

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

MattGaiser wrote: post #33
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.

Some companies swear by this. CP Rail is notorious for training everyone to drive a train.

That kind of makes sense philosophically if your business is trains, but I don't think that their business was AI agents. Although given they have a VP of AI, I have no idea. What a crazy title.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#76

Post by paodealho »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #10

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.

Goes to show how infested with disconnected management this industry is.

All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#77

Post by coldpie »

blindriver wrote: post #72
coldpie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.

If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further. I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away fr…

I try them a few times a month, always to underwhelming results. They're always wrong. Maybe I'll find an interesting thing to do with them some day, I dunno. It's just not a fun or interesting tool for me to learn to use so I'm not motivated. I like deterministic & understandable systems that always function correctly; "smart" has always been a negative term in marketing to me. I'm more motivated to learn to drive a city bus or walk a postal route or something, so that's the direction I'm headed in.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#78

Post by coldpie »

Rover222 wrote: post #70
coldpie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try these things a couple times a month. They're always underwhelming. Earlier this week I had the thing work tells me to use (claude code sonnet 4? something like that) generate some unit tests for a new function I wrote. I had a number of objections about the utility of the test cases it chose to write, but the largest problem was that it assigned the expected value to a test case struct field and then... didn't…

Try Opus?

Eh, there's a new shiny thing every 2 months. I'm waiting for the tools to settle down rather than keep up with that treadmill. Or I'll just go find a new career that's more appealing.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#79

Post by irishcoffee »

Rover222 wrote: post #22
upupupandaway wrote: post #6

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…

I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.

> I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting.

I am aware of a large company that everyone in the US has heard of, planning on laying off 30% of their devs shortly because they expect a 30% improvement in "productivity" from the remaining dev team.

Exciting indeed. Imagine all the divorces that will fall out of this! Hopefully the kids will be ok, daddy just had an accident, he won't be coming home.

If you think anything that is happening with the amount of money and bullshit enveloping this LLM disaster, you should put the keyboard down for a while.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#80

Post by nilkn »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #69
nilkn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.

That’s simply not true. Developers hand-writing assembly readily adopted compilers, accountants readily adopted spreadsheets, and farmers readily adopted tractors and powered mills.

That's false. Those things were in fact resisted in some cases. For instance, look up the swing riots of the 1830s.
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