I find people relying way too much on AI tools. If I pay someone a salary, they need to understand the actually answer the give me. And their butt needs to be on the line if the answer is wrong. That is the purpose of them getting a salary. It is not just to do the work, but it is to be responsible for the results. AI breaks this in a lot of the use cases I see crop up on ycombinator.
If some AI tools outstrips the ability for a human to be in the decision loop, then that AI tool's usefulness is not so great.
Sadly, the ones who take the time to be sure of the answer they give and stick around to put their butt on the line provide too much value in their position to be replaced, so they tend to NOT get promoted. One of the best ways to climb the corporate ladder is to actually give quick, plausibly sounding answers and move before their butt ends up on the line.
These incentive structures now give tools for mediocre bullshitters to bullshit their way through and indirectly promote proliferation of these tools.
> These incentive structures now give tools for mediocre bullshitters to bullshit their way through and indirectly promote proliferation of these tools.
This scares me a lot. I'm a software consultant and I see my software and solutions being appropriated by bullshitters from inside the company. I don't know what to expect from the future anymore.
I've seen this cycle play out quite a few times long before LLMs. What scares me this time is the wide ranging possible consequences of the automatic assistant in terms of how far they can lead us down the garden path and how hard people are pushed to become BSers.
The advent of LLMs is kind of brilliant, because now instead of the chain-of-responsibility landing on some lowly engineer who might get fired, it can be brickwalled into some LLM. Good guy LLM doesn't care who's pointing their finger at it. Good guy LLM doesn't have their job on the line.
No. LLMs are not some new moral beacon that leadership will be happy to have a finger pointed at.
Historically, "leadership" at organizations haven't cared about objective truths when those truths conflict with their desires. So why would they care about what a hyped up gradient descent has to say?
I'm not a huge fan of AI stuff, but the output quality is (usually) above that of what BSers were putting out.
While I still need to double check my BS team members, the problems with the code they are pushing is lower than what it was pre-AI everywhere. To me, that's a win.
I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather have mediocre AI code written than the low quality code I say before LLMs became as popular as they are.
Yes. However, frankly, BSers weren't maintaining a good architecture anyways (in my experience). Code simply landed where it could rather than addressing the overarching problem.
A BSer is about pushing for things that don't make sense but sound like they solve more constraints than anything possible to implement could. It is very unlikely they are giving you code that could compile. (Though if so there's a little bug or todo in it that just happens to be Turing award's material.)
On a code level I'm inclined to agree that it will do better line-by-line.
On more abstract things I think it has to have intentional filters to not follow you down a rathole like flat earth doctrine if you match the bulk of opinion in verbose authors in a subject. I don't see the priority for adding those filters being recognized on apolitical STEM oriented topics.
This is kind of par for the course for consultants tbh. Make sure to keep, log and publish your solutions on your own CV for future contracts. Or if you like the company, apply to work there yourself.
Lately I think more and more about the famous IBM quote - "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
I think this also applies to current AI solutions and I think that's precisely why the best workers will be humans who both use AI and will put their accountability at stake.
Management is routinely unaccountable and extremely good at avoiding accountability. If this is the difference, humans cant do management decisions either.
Whether management can be held accountable is a question of will. The difference is that they can be held accountable if people so choose, whereas a computer never can.
Maybe a decade ago, I wanted to have some fun with a corporate structure.
One thing I wanted to do, was setup an AI as CEO and board member of a small company. Then, all pay for contracts I do would flow through that entity.
This was going to be simple algo AI, with pre-scripted decisions including "hire an expert for unknown issues" then "vote yes to expert's solution". The expert always being me, of course, under contract.
I'd take a much lower hourly rate for normal rech work, and instead keep capital in the business. The business would buy an old warehouse, have servers, and a guard.
I'd be hired as the guard too.
You can hire guards with the requirement they sleep on site. In such a case the lodging isn't income, as it is required for the job.
So I could take a very low hourly rate, and maybe options in shares.
And of course the car would be corporate leased, and all that.
This is perfectly legit setup in my tax jurisdiction, except for the AI part. Back then, I had two goals.
The first was a way to amusingly conceal where I live. It bugs me that I have to disclose this. The second was to keep as much of my earnings in a corporation, and the mortgage also gave the corporation an asset with increasing value.
But my name would not be on the registration for the company as a board member. Or CEO.
And in fact my relationship to the company would be under contract as a sole proprietor, so no need to file certain employee laden paperwork.
Upon retirement, I could cash out the company in a variety of ways, after exercising my options.
(The company would also be required to help with a bridge loan for this)
Can’t you pull of something similar using irrevocable trusts ? Overly simplified, but have a trust registered through an agent you trust( ha ha), have them add you as a trustee, they then resign?
I believe its just marketing. The "AI" will ultimately be used as a Natural Language Calculator. IMO we will eventually give up trying to make calculator designs, plans, reviews and interprets. Things too good to be true will fade and remain academic after the bubble bursts.
Often this is true but I find that for complex or semi-complex applications with confusing (and often shitty) user interfaces LLMs are pretty much a net positive. For all of their faults, one thing LLMs are good at is providing a more user friendly UX for complex apps that are used rarely.
For observability I find most apps fit in this category. They are complex, they usually have UX that is so bad it makes me rage and I don't use most of their deep level features very often.
I think Jira could also benefit. Its UX is so bad it borders on criminal.
The hallucination issue can be worked around by providing that demonstrates the agent's working (i.e. what tools they called with what parameters).
> The hallucination issue can be worked around by providing that demonstrates the agent's working (i.e. what tools they called with what parameters).
And this is (in my opinion) an intractable problem - You can get the AI to list the tools/parameters it used, but then you can't be sure that it hasn't just hallucinated parts of that list as well, unless you both understand that they were the right tools and right parameters to use, and run them yourself to verify the output. And at that point you might as well just have done it yourself in the first place.
I.e. if you can't trust the AI, you can't trust the AI to tell you why you should trust the AI.
It's intractable unless the problem space demands 100% correctness at all times.
When Im using observability apps I dont demand correctness, I'm very happy if the LLM came up with 3 hypotheses about what happened and I could discard 2 of them by reading its working.
This doesn't matter. Make the human responsible, if they want to use tools they don't understand, they make a mistake and get fired. The next human won't make the same mistake, and the problem fixes itself. This has always been the case, AI or no.
>Make the human responsible, if they want to use tools they don't understand, they make a mistake and get fired.
>The next human won't make the same mistake, and the problem fixes itself.
This presumes that the human mandating tool use, the human making the mistake, and the human held responsible are one and the same.
The tool is making the mistake, and if the human mandating the tool use and the human being responsible for the tool use aren't the same, you have bigger problems.
Humans can become tools given enough layers of responsibility. How do you think the board/CEO get anything done? They move their C-levels like the engineer moves their tools.
We've had a similar long running joke about architects.
Step 1. Design system that gets push back because a bunch of things appear to be buzzwords
Step 2. Force it through politically
Step 3. Quit with shiney buzzword on CV
Step 4. Narrowly avoid being around when shit hits the fan.
I find developers are usually much more concerned about it working well because it ends up being their baby. Not always of course, but more often than architects that don't actually have to do the work.
I don’t understand the premise: you were hired to do the job, you do the job, tooling improves so you do more job with less resources. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Lower-skilled people will be able to “do the job” with the new tooling (on a level that management believes to be good enough), and doing more job with less resources also means with less human resources. There is no win-win, similar to how there is no win-win for artists who in principle can now produce more “art” with less resources.
That's not new though, the bar for software development has been continuously dropping - at least on paper - since the profession started. I don't know assembly or manual memory management in C, but I do know languages and tools that allow me to do the job. Do I steal jobs from assembly / C developers?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI either and it's only a matter of time before my day job goes from "rewrite this (web) app from 5-10 years ago" to "rewrite this AI assisted or generated (web) app from 5-10 years ago". But I don't think it's going to cost that many jobs in the long run.
> it's only a matter of time before my day job goes from "rewrite this (web) app from 5-10 years ago" to "rewrite this AI assisted or generated (web) app from 5-10 years ago".
That seems optimistic. It all goes according to plan you won't get to write or rewrite anything anymore. You'll just be QA reviewing AI output. If you find something wrong you don't get to correct it, nobody will pay for coders, you'll just be telling AI about the problem so it can try to correct it until the code passes and the hallucinations are gone. That way they can pay you much less while you help train AI to get better and better at doing your old job.
I don’t think this is true at all, its very evident when you see how quickly ai assistants break down if they meet established, complex codebases that do a little more than your average todo list app.
some people who used to have a high-skill job will have their skill be devalued as AI takes over - this is a consequence of technological improvement. It is not a right that society maintains a level of value in an acquired skill. They will have to adapt.
As for fewer farmers, that is exactly it - those who would have been farmers would be required to acquire new skills or pursue something other than farming. Bringing this back to AI - artists, writers and programmers who get displaced will need to adapt. In the long term, the massive decrease in costs of production of various "creative" endeavours will produce new industries, new demand and increase overall wealth - even if it is not shared evenly (in the same sense that past technological leaps are also not shared evenly).
>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
Tooling has made us vastly more efficient since the days of FORTRAN and punch cards, which has caused millions more of us to be able to employed in the field. Few companies could afford websites built with ancient tech, but everyone can afford websites built with recent tech and, as a result, everyone has one.
NB: Firing 20% of employees requires a 25% increase in efficiency by the simple math.
My stance has always been to lean on the available tools to free up time to work on the more interesting problems that deliver value to the organisation / company. Has been a good strategy to date.
Sadly, the current environment does not reflect that in my experience. There is a vicious focus on keeping profit margins at a steady rate at all costs while slashing spend on tooling which requires re-work on solved problems. :/
At some point the music is going to stop and it's not going to be pretty I suspect. :(
organizations that don't trust their engineers to work towards delivering value (by using better tooling, efficiency increasing automation etc), means that they don't improve and is accepting the current status quo.
That's why you need to keep an eye out, and smell whether the management understands it or not. Plan to leave, as your value contribution will not give you back the reward that such contributions deserve in this type of organization.
That's the very superficial theory, but in practice it means your company can do 20% more (?? I can't math) work. I've worked in B2C companies for years and there's always more work, never a point where they have to downsize.
There's a lot of make work out there. And AI does help. Just today it got me out a self made jam with sqlalchemy. But it's not the panacea that the entertainment financial reports make it out to be.
That’s not new in the age of AI. I’ve refused code reviews with blatant race conditions, initialisation order problems, even stuff that literally triggers compiler warnings, and been told “it’s not a big deal” in response.
I don't understand why parent is downvoted. I'm not an AI booster, but "if you use X tool then you don't understand" is a bad argument and needs to stop.
You're supposed to read the output critically and you're still responsible for it. AI or not AI.
I agree. Unluckily the 'take the money and blame every and anyone(thing) else' is a very old game regardless of the context and the tools used. Just look at the characteristic trait of all societies: politics. Barf! Our parents spent a lot of effort trying (with more or less success) distinguishing the honests from shitheads, the reliables from cheats. We are in a constant struggle to learn it further on our own.
Anyhow, perhaps looking at what tools some are using could be a better and better indicator of who are the responsible and who are the not that much responsible types when giving away our hard earned money for something we need and want to receive in exchange.
It seems more likely that people will get paid more. When companies want to reduce labor costs they usually lay off people, not decrease salaries. We see this happening in FAANG. The remaining workers will not only need to understand their industry domain, but they will also need to be skilled in working with AI tools. People who can do both well will be in demand.
I like this reply because it shows the shifting paradigm of hireability. Years ago, software engineers used to be hired just for their coding talent and would be put up with even if they were arrogant and had poor hygiene. With time, we all rebranded as problem-solvers, now required to be good communicators and team players in addition to writing good code. The next evolution is that we will be the ones responsible for a certain area, and how we get it done will be abstracted away.
I used to think the same way. But life taught me that responsibility is a fairy tale only for the bottom 90% — a story told to keep them obedient, hardworking, and self-blaming. Meanwhile, the top 10% rewrite the rules, avoid accountability, and externalize blame when things go wrong. And if you’re not in that elite circle, you either pay the price for their mistakes — or you’re told there’s just nothing you can do about it.
Ironically, finding ways to spin stories like that IS one way of taking responsibility, even if it's only a way to take responsibility for the narratives that are created after things happen.
Because those narratives play an important role in the next outcome.
The error is when you expect them to play for your team. Most people will (at best) be on the same team as those they interact with directly on a typical day. Loyalty 2-3 steps down a chain of command tends to be mostly theoretic. That's just human nature.
So what happens when the "#¤% hts the fan, is that those near the top take responsbility for themselves, their families and their direct reports and managers first. Meaning they externalize damage to elsewhere, which would include "you and me".
Now this is baseline human nature. Indeed, this is what natural empathy dictates. Because empathy as an emotions is primarily triggered by those we interact with directly.
Exceptions exist. Some leaders really are idealists, governed more by the theories/principles they believe in than the basic human impulses.
But those are the minority, and this may aven be a sign of autism or something similar where empathy for oneself and one's immediate surrounding is disabled or toned down.
> I used to think the same way. But life taught me that responsibility is a fairy tale only for the bottom 90% — a story told to keep them obedient, hardworking, and self-blaming.
I think you're missing the big picture. You're focusing on your conspiracy theory that the hypothetical 10% are the only ones valuing responsibility as a manipulation tactic. However, what do you do when anyone, being it a team member or a supermarket or an online retailer or a cafe employee fails to meet your bar of responsibility? Do you double down on their services, or do you adapt so that their failure no longer affects your day?
You've put together this conspiracy that only higher ups value responsibility, and only as a crowd control strategy. If you take a step back and look at your scenario, you'll notice that it is based on how you are in a position where you are accountable to them. Is that supposed to mean that middle management is not accountable for anything at all? Is no mom and pop shop accountable for anything? Why is Elon Musk crying crocodile tears over how unfair the world is and for having been kicked out of DOGE and the world stopping buying Tesla cars?
Richard Field (Lehman Brothers) walked away with 500-1000 Million USD after causing the worldwide financial crisis.
Trump bankrupted multiple corporations, impacting the lives of thousands of workers and their families. He is president now.
RFK Junior's budget cuts stopped important work on HIV and cancer research, delaying finding a cure or better treatment, which will cause pain and suffering for millions of people. He just sacked the entire vaccine committee. He still is secretary of health.
I would go on, but my stomach ulcer is already flaming up again.
The only people who face the consequences of their actions are you and me. The wealthy shit on your morals of taking responsibility. That's not a conspiracy theory.
I see it the same way, but LLMs like any tool depend on how they are used. I am mostly using them:
1. As an additional layer of checks, to find potential errors in things I have been doing (texts, code, ideas). This works good for the most part.
2. As a mental sparings partner where I explore certain ideas with me being the one to guide the LLM, instead of the other way around. This is much more about exploring thoughts than it is about the LLM providing anything I actually use anywhere.
3. As an additional tool to explore new bodies of text and code
But of course it makes me wonder how people will fare that don't know their shit yet. I had a LLM tell a student an electrical lie that would have very likely have caused a fire before, where the LLM got the math wrong in exactly the opposite way of how it would work in reality.
£50k full stack dev in London? You're going to get AI slop these days, particularly the moment you encourage usage within the org. LLMs will help underpaid people act their wage. You've already asked them to do 2 or 3 people's jobs with "full stack"
Will you pay £20k more for someone who won't use AI?
We’re encouraged to use AI at work (I’m senior full stack and have been coding for 20 years) and honestly I’ve Ben experimenting a lot and other than menial work, doing stuff myself is still way faster when you have a large existing codebase. I spent probably £200 of tokens last week trying I get it to expand a lib in an elixir monolith I’m unfamiliar with, and add a controller to a large old Phoenix API. Couldn’t get it working. This week got some good rest and just did the whole thing myself in like a couple days.
I either:
a. spend money on a person and take money and time to specify the business problem to this person and take money and time to judge the results
b. skip the person and just use the AI itself
The difference between the two is that I don't have some metaphorical hostage to execute in "b". If the task is trivial enough, I don't need a hostage.
Does this reflect HNs average view of how employment functions and how employers should treat their employees? As an employer, I find this post mostly confusing and having very little to do with the role of actual, real life employees in my experience.
There is definitely hype around AI but there is also value in it.
The realistic scenario for a well functioning organization is not to replace their entire DevOps team with AI agents and then realize the hard reality that their entire tech infra is on fire but to actually use these as a tool that makes their best DevOps person more efficient and make their DevOps resources much more leaner. This increases the productivity for the same cost. Even though this sounds grim for the future of work, this is what I feel is going to happen.
This AI usage ain't that. When diagnosing SRE type issues you want useful facts fast. You are playing detective and AI provides leads but you still need to make human decisions for most things. AI could do stuff like rollbacks of recent deployments tho.
Auto rolling back on bad metrics post deployment is something that doesn't require AI. Not in a "you can do it with a lot of work and a huge team" sense, but in a "take a few days to review your metrics and then implement it in a day".
Yeah for context I mean doing slow rollouts and checking error rates on a new deployment is a given. That's not AI.
But for an alert for a deployment that has been out for a while there is a bit of a decision to be made as whether to roll back, scale up etc. sometimes rolling back achieves nothing other than increasing the delta again when you roll forward and delaying stuff.
> AI breaks this in a lot of the use cases I see crop up on ycombinator.
AI doesn't break anything. The responsibility is exercised by upper leadership. And current leadership is high on AI crystal meth like an NYC subway junkie.
>If I pay someone a salary, they need to understand the actually answer the give me. And their butt needs to be on the line if the answer is wrong.
What's that got to do with AI exactly? Sure, there's the chance that this AI thing will disappear tomorrow and they won't be able to do anything, but so too is the chance the stackoverflow disappears
> I think you'll have a lot more independent software devs. I think that's good, corporations were surprisingly bad at developing software.
Will you, though? I mean, working on software for a living means having someone paying you to do something. If a corporation with an established business and reliable revenue can't justify paying you for your work, who do you expect to come in and cover your rent?
I don't know if you've worked for an "established" corporation developing software before but most of what they pay you for is dealing with internal (arguably mostly social) stuff. Some minority is actual useful software development work.
> (...) but most of what they pay you for is dealing with internal (arguably mostly social) stuff.
Not really. They pay you to deliver something, but you also need to coordinate and interact with people. That involves coordinating and syncing.
There is absolutely no position or role whatsoever, either in a big corporation or small freelancer gig, that you do not need to coordinate and interact with people.
Pray tell, how do you expect to be paid while neither delivering results nor coordinating with anyone else?
That's what I'm thinking, while corporate lays off people, these people groups up, offer human services, instead of corporate AI bull, corporate dies off, and we are back to software actually being people things again.
Cheap-as-chips AI from gigantic data-centres is certain to go away, one way or another. Either the companies succeed in their game plan, and start to raise prices once they've established a set of dependent customers, or else they all go bust and the data-centres stand idle whilst the industry puzzles over a business model that works.
Of course the technology will remain. You'll still be able to run models locally (but they won't be as good). And eventually someone will work out how to make the data-centres turn a profit (but that won't be cheap for users).
Or maybe the local models will get good enough, and the data-centres will turn out to be a gigantic white elephant.
I was not clear, apologies, I meant to say, I feel the corporate control over things should go away.
AI is definitely not going away. But I feel it could be like how it was in 90s, when people can get their hands on a computer and do amazing things. Yes, I know corporate existed then, but I think it was not this direct, and sinister as it is now.
Many of the corporates that are trying to getting rid of employees in favor of AI, So they might lose a huge ground to someone who keeps the old school way going while leveraging AI in a more practical way, and general people will soon realize it's not what they're being fed, and revert, but it's not that easy for the big ones to rollback.
Which might end the corporate control over many of the things.
This is what I meant, but I am sleepy and tired, failed to articulate properly, hopefully the gist of it was clear.
If you assume that AI will further enshittify the corporate software program writ large, it’s no easy to see how this is analogous to the dot com boom where new good ideas get sidelined and easy ones get mainlined, and the outsiders ultimately storm the castle and win. Granted, I don’t really think that is the case, but it’s a possibility
that's the problem. market is already oversaturdated. just check HN posts about App Store crisis we have now
gatekeeping on distribution is unbelievable. getting something to financially work requires marketing and "white passs from gatekeepers" expenditures which eat away any margins you may have
if you get laid off by big tech (no matter years of experience) chances are you are going to be doing Doordash and living in a tent
> gatekeeping on distribution is unbelievable. getting something to financially work requires marketing and "white passs from gatekeepers" expenditures which eat away any margins you may have
That is one way of putting it.
Another way to put it is that app stores are so saturated with N versions of the same God damned app doing exactly the same God damned thing that even when they start to charge a gatekeeping fee you still get marker saturation.
The squeeze of later stage capitalism: growth disappears as investment gains. Capital is redistributed from the less/non-capital owners to the owners. Any company not willing to push to get competitive ROI will not receive competitive investment. As an investor, why chase x% when x+1% alternatives exist?
If you hire someone, you need to vet them enough to mitigate a bad hire. Your butt needs to be on the line if they are a bad hire.
Saying things like this in isolation is silly because it just shifts blame rather than creating an environment of teamwork and rigor. What I got out of the article is that AI helps humans get to answers faster. You still need to verify that the answers are correct.
That's why I said it helps, not that it's perfect or absolute. It's still up to a diligent human to verify the output from AI in the context they're working it. I personally use AI to do more, learn more, and help with context switching. It helps me make more efficient use of my personal and professional time while still challenging me to learn about topic I previously didn't have or make the time to.
Those that blindly post @grok please help or use AI for everything will likely experience some level of atrophy in their critical thinking skills. I would advise those people to think about this and adjust course.
In many cases, people are satisfied with responses that are almost or somewhat correct. That's a valid approach - that's exactly how prometheus monitoring works (pull-based metrics): we don't see the details of that spike, just the big picture and that's good enough and cheap in a sea of datapoints where pods come and go...
It feels like another example of regression toward the mean in our society. At the same time, this creates a valuable opportunity for diligent, detail-oriented professionals to truly stand out.
Well said! If AI can start me at 80% and I take it the remaining 20% that helps me do more and learn with my time. It frees me up to do the human things that are required of me.
I'm actively aware of the regression towards the mean and discuss that with my peers frequently. It helps me prevent atrophy of my skills while reaping the benefits of AI. Put another way, there are people out there using AI to punch well above their weight while not actually being a good fighter in the first place. If you're a good fighter are you going to let an inexperienced fighter step into the rings that you're meant to step into?
If some AI tools outstrips the ability for a human to be in the decision loop, then that AI tool's usefulness is not so great.