8 ms·

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office

• teddy-smith 2y ago
  The article presents some good points but to me it seems like not being a jerk and calling Will.I.am "nobodys favorite rapper" is a selling point for A.I.
  • dkdbejwi383 2y ago
    A selling point for humans is that some of them are actually funny, unlike LLMs which just regurgitate synatically competent but humourously incompetent waffle.
    • glitchc 2y ago
      I dunno. The latter part sounds like a number of humans I've interacted with. They're all nice people though.
  • anildash 2y ago
    I will admit it was not my kindest joke, but on the other hand, I genuinely did not expect him to read a treatise on IOT infrastructure.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • ctkhn 2y ago
      I think you have some leeway joking on a guy who wrote a song called "Let's get retarded"
      • anildash 2y ago
        Was genuinely my feeling at the time, too.
• postalrat 2y ago
  AI-first is the evolution of WFH.
• srveale 2y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with the main argument, but > did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to the managers and require work communication on them. I know this was true for many companies. This isn't the perfect analogy anyway, since one major reason companies did this was to increase security, while forcing AI onto begrudging workers feels like it could have the opposite effect. The commonality is efficiency, or at least the perception of it by upper management. One example I can think of where there was worker pushback but it makes total sense is the use of electronic medical records. Doctors/nurses originally didn't want to, and there are certainly a lot of problems with the tech, but I don't think anyone is suggesting now that we should go back to paper. You can make the argument that an "AI first" mandate will backfire, but the notion that workers will collectively gravitate towards new tech is not true in general.
  • pxx 2y ago
    I don't think your example is really a counterexample. Work-provided Blackberries allowed you to be more responsive to work messages while communicating over an ostensibly secure medium. on the other hand, making sure that people use AI for performance reviews would be akin to measuring the percentage of work days that you used your blackberry. that's not something that anyone sane ever did. somewhat in the same vein, nobody ever sent a directive saying that all interoffice memoranda must be typed in via blackberry.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      Yea, the point is, if a product or technology is useful, people will want to use it. They'll bang down your door to be allowed to use it. They'll even surreptitiously use it if you don't allow it. If you have to mandate that they use it, what does that really say about the tool? A better example is probably source control. It might not have been true in the past, but these days, nobody has to mandate that you use source control. We all know the benefits, and if we're starting a new software business, we're going to use source control by default from day one.
• lsy 2y ago
  The point is well-made that truly revolutionary technologies don't need top-down mandates to drive adoption, and it's certainly a bad sign for the AI industry that we are in this phase of the hype cycle. But it also seems likely that top-down mandates will create perverse incentives for product development around these technologies, preventing genuinely valuable use cases from emerging as people determine what does and doesn't work. If everyone, to satisfy their CEO's emotional attachment to AI, is forced to type into a chat box to get dreck out and then massage it into something usable for their work, we'll see that ineffective mode persist longer, and probably miss out on better modes of interaction and more well-targeted use cases.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    I wonder about the opportunity cost of going all-in on AI. What great products are not being developed, simply because every CEO is currently under this AI spell and is insisting that everything everyone does must be about AI? AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and probably causing actually useful projects to be canceled or de-prioritized.
    • mulmen 2y ago
      It’s not every CEO. If you have a better idea do that and outcompete the companies that are making what you think is a bad bet.
  • RevEng 2y ago
    I'm seeing a lot of that in my own job. Every company has a top-down mandate to use more AI and a budget to back it up, my employer included. But we write software. Now this means we are chasing the AI dragon making LLM-based software in the hopes that we can capitalize on the hype. I would be more charitable in my description if I thought we were going after the high value targets, but our marketing strategy is literally "AI in everything". I'm all for selling what the customer wants to buy, but I don't think that's actually what we are making. Trying to make everything at once means making none of it well. There's a huge disconnect between what customers think AI will do for them and what we are actually capable of delivering. When customers and colleagues alike complain that something doesn't work well and ask how we are going to fix it I have to keep reminding them "this is an open area of research in the field; nobody has found a solution to this yet." Nobody likes hearing that, but it's the truth. It reminds me a lot of the dotcom bubble. People thought they could get rich just my making a web site that talked about their company. Even many of the biggest most successful early movers failed completely. We can all agree today that the Internet has provided tremendous value and really has changed the world, but not in the way most people thought it would then. Most of the startups being started didn't have a business plan beyond "it's on the web" and that's where I see a lot of the AI development right now. They think making the technology makes it profitable without asking what problems it solves better than our existing solutions. Some of what we are developing shows potential, but a lot of it is a solution in search of a problem. It's definitely resulting in opportunity costs as we pour money and people into projects that only exist because we can put AI in the name, taking priority over projects that we had already planned and vetted with customers and market research. For a company that prides itself on slow and steady progress and long term stability, we sure are jumping head first into AI solutions and we are doing so at a rate that precludes any kind of design, testing, or quality control. We are selling shaky prototypes and our customers are happily paying for them. Everyone on both sides is so blinded by the hype that they are setting aside everything they've learned over decades of experience and success. I can't wait for the hype to end so we can start talking about where LLMs and other generative AI are actually useful.
• booleandilemma 2y ago
  I thought AI-first was the new blockchain?
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Aside: where do the extra slashes in the submitted anildash urls come from? frequent reoccurrence. An rss feed somewhere? Some scheme for him to track outside shares? heh https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/ https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-ret...
  • ctkhn 2y ago
    Was thinking the same thing. When I go through google to his blog posts I don't see the double slash and it isn't there when I go to his blog homepage and click through to the specific post.
    • anildash 2y ago
      I might have screwed something up in my RSS (well, technically Atom) feed. I'll take a look later.
• JimDabell 2y ago
  > This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. I’ve been around long enough to see resistance to things like the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by everybody. An awful lot of people are very set in their ways and will refuse to change unless given a firm push. For instance, if you weren’t around before version control became the norm, then you probably missed the legions of developers who said things like “Ugh, why do I have to use this stupid thing? It just slows me down and gets in my way! Why can’t I just focus on writing code?” Those developers had to be dragged into modern software development when they were certain it was a stupid waste of time. AI can be extremely useful and there’s a lot of people out there who refuse to give it a proper try. Using AI well is a skill you need to learn and if you don’t see positive results on your first couple of attempts that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it just means you are a beginner. If you tried a new language and didn’t get very far at first, would you blame the language or recognise that you lack experience? An awful lot of people are stuck in a rut where they tried an early model, got poor results to begin with, and refused to use it again. These people do need a firm, top-down push, or they will be left behind. This has happened before, many times. Contrary to the article’s claims, sometimes top-down pushes have been necessary even for things we now consider near universally good and productive.
  • suddenlybananas 2y ago
    There have also been many fads that were forced on people which fizzled out and didn't amount to much.
  • trilobyte 2y ago
    I see you speak from experience. I feel like I'm watching the same cycle play out over and over again, which is that a new, transformative technology lands, people with a vested interest spend a lot of time denouncing it (your examples mostly land for me), the new technology gets over-hyped and fails to meet some bar and the haters all start crowing about how it's just B.S. and won't ever be useful, etc. etc. Meanwhile, people are quietly poking around figuring out the boundaries of what the technology really can do and pushing it a little further along. With the A.I. hype I've been keeping my message pretty consistent for all of the people who work for me: "There's a lot of promise, and there are likely a lot of changes that could come if things keep going the way they are with A.I., but even if the technology hits a wall right now that stops it from advancing things have already changed and it's important to embrace where we are and adapt".
• andy99 2y ago
  did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I see this is already a favorite quote amongst commentors. It's mine too: I had a job ~15 years ago where the company had introduced an internal social network, that was obviously trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook et al without understanding why people liked social networks. Nobody used it because it was useless, but management evidently was invested in it because your profile and use of that internal site did in fact factor in to performance reviews. This didn't last long, maybe only one review cycle before everyone realized it was irretrievably lost. The parallel with the article is very apt thought. The stick instead of the carrot is basically an indication that a dumb management idea is in its death throes.
  • ramesh31 2y ago
    A social network never did a weeks worth of work for me in 10 minutes. Keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.
    • skybrian 2y ago
      If it makes that much of a difference and quality is the same, nobody will care whether you used AI or not. It’s an implementation detail.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • h2zizzle 2y ago
      John Henry won, he just died doing it. Another victim of racial healthcare disprities, probs. EDIT: Also, depends on your chronological window. Is, "Posting a video advertising your services that reaches 30,000 people," a week's worth phone-calling? Of mailing letters? Of knocking on doors? Productivity increases are incremental and built on a ton of up-front capex, but they're there all the same. AI-pushers, of all people, should understand and be ready to defend this fact.
  • 2y ago
• mjheart 2y ago
  As someone who works at a larger corporation who takes the quoted "normal policy", I can attest that it's extremely refreshing. Incidentally, some people on my team have used Copilot for task management, but nobody has found it useful for coding / debugging / testing.
  • walleeee 2y ago
    What is "task management" in this context and why did your coworkers find llms useful for it?
    • alabastervlog 2y ago
      Heh, I can definitely imagine hooking up an LLM to our task board's API and having it suggest actions (say, marking something as ready for QA) based on my Git log, then execute those if approved. Probably save me a shitload of time. Hell, if I just let it run loose and do whatever it decided to do, daily, with no intervention, it'd likely do a better job than the median developer (and better than I do). Maybe suggest next-tasks for me. I'd worry about it damaging something, but I worry about that a ton every time I have to open up any of those confusing-UI shared-workspace sorts of things anyway. That this would be a significant time savings mostly has to do with most task tracking systems being so very miserable and slow to work in for the majority of the people expected to use them, though. If we used something lighter and closer to where the work is happening (the code) it wouldn't really be that helpful.
      • ctkhn 2y ago
        Is marking a jira ticket ready for testing that complicated? That doesn't seem like something that I both spend a ton of time on while being non productive to want to outsource to AI
        • alabastervlog 2y ago
          Various administrative junk probably takes up about 20% of my actual wall-time as far as the work itself, but contributes enormously more than that to my mental fatigue, task-switching time loss, and general stress level. It subjectively feels like 50% of my job. Interacting with Jira or Azure Devops or Asana or what have you is far from everything, but is a decent chunk of that. This does tend to be a much bigger problem at bigcos than smaller shops, though.
• cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  "did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack?" In fact I remember very distinctly the Google TGIF All-Hands where Larry and Sergey stood up and told SWEs they should be trying to do development on tablets, because, y'know, mobile was ascendant, they were afraid of being left behind in mobile, and wanted to develop for "mobile first" (which ended up being on the whole "mobile only" but I'll put that aside for now). It frankly had the same aura of ... not getting it... lack of vision pretending to be visionionary. In the end, the job of upper management is not to dictate the tools to engineers to drive them to efficiency. We frankly already have that motivation ourselves. If engineers are skeptical of "AI", it's mostly because we've already been engaged with it and understand many of its limitations, not because we're being "luddites" One sign of a healthy internal engineering culture is when engineers who are actually doing the work work together to pick their tools to do the work, rather than have them hoisted on them. When management sends memos out demanding people use AI, what they're actually reflecting is their own fear of being left behind in the buzzword cycle. Few of us doing the work have that fear. I've seen more projects damaged by excessive novelty and forced "innovation" than the other way around.
• hbsbsbsndk 2y ago
  Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his peers. My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".
  • ferguess_k 2y ago
    Actually the investment banking industry seems to be doing this for ages. And if people think about it, it's actually not too different from Leetcoding.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • BoGoToTo 2y ago
    I remember one town hall where he was asked "If you had to start over again, what sort of company would you start?" and his answer was "I wouldn't, all the good ideas are already taken."
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      That's genuinely astonishing in its degree of ignorance.
      • flappyeagle 2y ago
        Why? It’s the same thing DHH says. He’s never going to have a better idea than rails and basecamp. Tobi is the same with Shopify
        • remich 2y ago
          There's a difference between having the humility to admit that you might not be able to hit another home run, and between claiming that "all the good ideas are taken." At best, the latter is an admission of a lack of a desire to even try anymore, at worst it shows a stunning lack of curiosity and creativity.
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  I know this post is about tech, and obviously HN is a tech centered site, and most people here work in tech, but let me say: Outside of tech, AI has been phenomenally helpful. I know many tech folk are falling over themselves for non-tech industry problems that can be software-solved then leased out monthly, and there are tons of these problems out there, but very hard to locate and model if you are outside the industry. But with the current crop of LLMs, people who don't know how to program, but recognize that a program could do this task, finally can now summon that program to do the task. The path still has a tech-ability moat, but I can only imagine the AI titans racing to get programming ability into Supply Chain Technician Kim's hands. Think Steve Jobs designing an IDE for your mother to use. I believe it will be the CEO's of these non-tech companies that will be pushing "AI first" and having people come in to show non-techy non-tech workers how to leverage LLMs to automate tasks. You guys have to keep in mind that if you walk into most offices in most places of the world, most workers will say "What the hell is a macro? I just go down the list line by line..."
  • dowager_dan99 2y ago
    >> But with the current crop of LLMs, people who don't know how to program, but recognize that a program could do this task, finally can now summon that program to do the task. The path still has a tech-ability moat, but I can only imagine the AI titans racing to get programming ability into Supply Chain Technician Kim's hands. Think Steve Jobs designing an IDE for your mother to use Brooks has yet to be proven wrong; even if this appears to be the silver bullet it could be just as likely that this widens the tech moat when non-programmers paint themselves into corners where they can't do their jobs without all the brittle, impossible to maintain code they've written. Think of the skilled trades vacuum we have in much of the Western world. Can Supply Chain Technician Kim Jr do her job without AI if she's never seen that before?
    • Workaccount2 2y ago
      I think the core disconnect is that the current tech paradigm is writing broad scope feature packed programs (and it kind of needs to be that way). One stop shops for every need that the broadest possible customer base could have, while minimizing time that needs to be spent on support. But I don't see that being the future. Instead I think people will just spin up bespoke ultra narrow scope programs (maybe scripts is more fitting here, but people like GUIs - scripts with GUIs?) that are generally under 3K LOC. You don't need an AI to one-shot Excel.exe if you just want a simple way to track how many plastic pellets came in today, and how many went out. A GUI on a simple program on an SQlite database will do that no problem. And you can ditch that bloated excel doc you have been using for years. At my own company we forwent a proprietary CAD package because Claude could decode the files we had, make a GUI for doing the transformation we needed to do, and properly reencode the file.
• dfilppi 2y ago
  [dead]
• hyfgfh 2y ago
  > The return to office fad was a big part of this effort, often largely motivated by reacting to the show of worker power in the racial justice activism efforts of 2020. Not against this point, but I don't get it, maybe because I don't live in the US, but I see as another way to "soft-fire" people, as is this AI crazy What I'm missing?
• Illniyar 2y ago
  "An average LLM won't even know that Drake's favorite MIME type is application/pdf" Is this seeding for future AI models? If I ask chatGPT a year from now what is drake's favorite Mime type would it confidently say "application/PDF"
  • eat 2y ago
    You can see this on perplexity now ;)
  • minimaxir 2y ago
    I tried that prompt against Google Gemini 2.5 Pro which has a cutoff date of January 2025 (enough to have knowledge of the Kendrick feud/the pdf jokes) but it couldn't do it, but was self-aware enough to know that the question was absurd and had an unexpected answer. > Joke/Wordplay: Is there a pun or play on words involving "Drake" and a MIME type? > Trick question/Testing the AI: The user might be testing if the AI will invent an answer, hallucinate, or recognize the absurdity.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • 85392_school 2y ago
    It's just a joke about AI not getting a joke (that's really just self-censoring).
• iLoveOncall 2y ago
  AI-first is the new blockchain, trying to fit a solution to a non-existent problem, that's it.
  • dowager_dan99 2y ago
    disagree - it shows some - maybe significant - value, which makes it far more dangerous in this AI-everything echo chamber.
    • iLoveOncall 2y ago
      I didn't say AI, or even more specifically GenAI is the same as blockchain. I said " AI-first" is.
• resolutefunctor 2y ago
  > stating plainly that he doesn't see AI replacing his employees. (Though that does immediately raise the "who brought that up?" question...) Almost everyone who isn't highly informed in this field is worried about this. This is a completely reasonable thing to include in a memo about "forced" adoption of AI. Because excluding it induces panic in the workforce. It is funny that this post calls out groupthink, while failing to acknowledge that they're falling into the groupthink of "CEO dumb" and "AI bad" Forced AI adoption is nothing more than a strategy, a gamble, etc from company leadership. It may work out great, it may not, and anyone stating with conviction one way or another is lying to themselves and everyone they're shouting to. It is no different than companies going "internet-first" years ago. Doesn't have to mean that the people making the decision are "performing" for each other or that they are fascists, my god. Imo its a great way of allowing high performers to create even more impact. A great developer typing syntax isn't valuable. Their ability to engineer solutions to challenges and problems is. Scaling that out to an entire company that believes in their people is no different, less time spent on the time-consuming functions of a job that are low-value in isolation, and more time spent on high-value functions of a job. The Twitter/Reddit-style "snark-for-clicks" approach is disappointing to see so high on a site like this that is largely comprised of intelligent and thoughtful people.
  • dorian-graph 2y ago
    > .. and "AI bad" He's not saying that though, is he? He's quite literally said that people have found AI useful, and that's great! For example: > We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them useful. And: > The strangest part is, the AI pushers don't have to lie about what AI can do! If, as they say, AI tools are going to get better quickly, then let them do so and trust that smart people will pick them up and use them. If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then .. Anyway, how many layers of accused irony and snark can we go down? Am I the next?
    • 2y ago
• renewiltord 2y ago
  Making sure everyone is using LLMs is smart. It’s a transformative technology and some people are just slow to adopt. Org wide process improvements often need mandates or they won’t happen. No different than using version control etc. There were and are engineers who would rather just rsync without having to do the bookkeeping paperwork of `git commit` but you mandate it nonetheless.
• Devasta 2y ago
  With AI, all we will need is staff to write down a few paragraphs of their needs and constraints and the computer will be able to deliver the desired outcomes. Also, despite the fact that we were all working remotely for years, we need you all to come into the office because water cooler chats are far better than writing down a few paragraphs outlining what you need and the constraints.
• hosh 2y ago
  The company I work for is getting bought out by another company. That acquiring company built their whole business and product on "people-first". They are making a lot of profit in an industry (real estate) that has been contracting. I don't know what their AI plans are, only that they have them, and I would not be surprised if they are building "people-first" AI into their products. I guess people, not things, creates value.
• zkmon 2y ago
  Not surprising. We have seen online-first, mobile-first, cloud-first and now AI-first. Oh, and I remember someone talking about customer-first as well.
• Lammy 2y ago
  > This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? They did for Android testing actually. The biggest status symbol within the company was based around who got the latest iPhone model first, who was important enough to get a prioritized and yearly upgrade, and who was stuck with their older models for another year. This was back in the iPhone 3GS/4/4S/5 era. I took advantage of this by getting them to special-order me expensive niche Androids, because it was the only way they could get any employee to use one lol
  • schwartzworld 2y ago
    And did they consider how many hours/week you used those phones in your performance reviews?
• hintymad 2y ago
  I have a more charitable view on the "AI-first" movement. When you're a CEO, the last thing you want is for your company to miss a major tech shift. We've seen this story play out repeatedly - companies that didn't adapt to Windows, to internet, or to mobile, ended up struggling or dying. The tricky part is that you can't just think or talk your way into a new paradigm - the entire company has to act. After all, good ideas and breakthroughs often come from individuals in the trenches instead of from executives. This means exploring new possibilities, running experiments, and constantly iterating based on what you learn. But the reality is that most people naturally resist change. They get comfortable with how things work today. In many companies, you're lucky if employees don't actively fight against new approaches. This is why CEOs sometimes need to declare company-wide mandate. Microsoft did this in the mid-90s with their famous "Internet Tidal Wave" pivot when Bill Gates sent that memo redirecting the entire company. Intel forced its "right-hand turn" when CPU business was still nascent. Without these top-down pushes, organizations tend to keep doing what they've always done. Or to say the least, such top-down mandate at least sends a clear message to the entire company, potentially triggering a cultural shift. The "AI-first" thing may well be overhyped, but it's probably just leaders trying to make sure their companies don't get left behind in what looks like a significant shift. Even if the mandate fails, at least the company can learn something valuable. Note I'm talking about directions. The mandate can fail badly due to poor execution, but that's a different topic.
  • remich 2y ago
    Yeah but there's a significant difference in the leader of a company shifting the goals, product, or market of a company in a top-down way and a leader attempting to shift the implementation details of goals in a top-down way. The former is the entire job of a CEO, the latter is micro-managing of the first order.
    • oddthink 2y ago
      Yes, but the message from Shopify leadership is "it's part of your job to mess around with this stuff and see what works". Not "use AI at all costs". The general feeling I'm getting is that using this AI stuff is important, but it's a learned skill, and we want as many people as possible to get familiar enough with it to have actual opinions. I find that pretty unobjectionable.
• flappyeagle 2y ago
  Anil is a smart guy so if this is his best set of arguments then I’m afraid Tobi is right. Every advancement in tech I’ve used in my lifetime was at first deployed top-down Smartphone (blackberries), Personal computers, Version control (CVS), PowerPoint The personal adoption FOLLOWED
• guywithahat 2y ago
  I feel like they're pretty conjoined. If you're working from home, why can't an AI just replace you? AI is great at performing narrow jobs, if you're a part of the company you're needed to build relationships and help grow the company in creative meaningful ways that can't be done remotely. The author seems to have a pretty pessimistic view of everything
  • remich 2y ago
    Pretty wild to claim that remote employees can't build relationships or help grow companies in creative or meaningful ways.
    • guywithahat 2y ago
      'Why would it be "wild"? This is a commonly accepted compromise of working from home
      • remich 2y ago
        No, it's not.
        • guywithahat 2y ago
          You have yet to suggest an answer or provide any insight
• quantadev 2y ago
  AI use is definitely a two edged sword. It can help us seasoned developers be much more productive, because we've seen all the anti-patterns, bad ideas, tarpits, and most "classes" of bad ideas and bad code that you can imagine; so when we get AI to generate code, we older developers can look at it, and in an instant know if it's good or bad code, most of the time. However, for the more Junior Devs (i.e. under 10 to 15 yrs experience), their judgement about Generated Code is often simply "Does it appear to work or not." and that's a very big problem, and a very dangerous problem, that will cause lower quality code to creep in and in a way where AI may allow them to crank out tons of work, but all of it super buggy code. And most everyone would agree we'd rather have simpler, less feature rich products that are solid and reliable, rather than products that are loaded with both features and bugs. So to all you seasoned developers out there, who have trouble getting hired, since you're over 40, your value as an employee has just quadrupled, compared to the less-experienced. The big question is, of course, how long will it take the 20ish to 30ish hiring managers to realize that, and start valuing experience and wisdom over youthfulness and good looks.
• stpedgwdgfhgdd 2y ago
  “This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone?” AI has the promise to optimize worker’s efficiency x-fold. This promise was not the case with smartphones, slack, etc. And AI will change everyone’s work in years to come, especially for developers.
• carterschonwald 2y ago
  I like the zingers: This would not get you invited to the fascist VC group chat, tho!
• akomtu 2y ago
  It's the old trick when the company hires cheap labor offshore and makes employees train their replacement. Except that today the cheap labor is AI that lives on a remote land called data centers, but unlike employees, AI works for food and has no ethics.
• jmtulloss 2y ago
  > AI is really good for helping you if you're bad at something, or at least below average. But it's probably not the right tool if you're great at something. This shows the author’s lack of experience in working with AI on something they’re great at. AI is great for experts (all the productivity gains, no tolerance for the bullshit) AI is great for newbies (you can do the thing!!) A more interesting take would be on the struggle to go from newbie to expert in a field dominated by AI. We’re too early to know how to do this. Of course AI-first is the future. We’re just still learning how to do it right.
  • dullcrisp 2y ago
    I think if you’re such an expert at something that you need AI to do it for you then that’s a good opportunity to hand it off to someone more junior.
    • jmtulloss 2y ago
      It’s probably not productive for a human to do work that AI can do well. Of course the trick is figuring out how to identify and verify that work. Experts can do this quickly.
  • krosaen 2y ago
    Agree. His argument is clever though in that if you disagree, you may appear like you think you are good at something that you are actually bad at :)
• sensanaty 2y ago
  Small rant coming up, can't help myself. We recently had an AI workshop type of thing as our company leadership is also falling for the AI-first BS, and it really felt like an Emperor has no clothes situation to me. Gist of it was that the VP of Eng and the CTO would sit down with the engineers and showcase AI tooling and techniques on using them etc, specifically Cursor which the VP surely has a vested interest in somehow with how much he salivates about it. It started off fine with some nice tips and context on how LLMs work for the unaware, but the absurdity truly started when they tried to fix some minor UI bugs that were sitting in the bug board as a showcase. One of the UI guys looks at the ticket for maybe 30 seconds before saying "oh it's probably X". The VP and CTO spent the next hour and a half trying to prompt their way into solving the bug. Failure, after failure, after failure. They tried a million different prompts, giving it full code context, limited code context, access to CLI tools. Some of the prompts they wrote were easily 1000+ words full of excruciating detail for what to try. Ultimately none of it worked, and yes they were using the latest and greatest SOTA models like Gemini 2.5 flash and Claude 3.7 and o3 and... The final fix, from that same UI guy as before, was a literal single character change in exactly where he said it was that took him all of 2 minutes to write up, test and push, a minute of which was just him finding the project in his messy folder. And after the absolute waste of time that hour and a half was, they, without a hint of irony, say "See how useful it was in our debugging?". I had to stifle a laugh because I felt like I was in some nightmare 1984-esque doublespeak world where the blind AI hype supercedes every ounce of real life evidence we all just witnessed before our very eyes. Coincidentally, 7 very strong senior and staff engineers quit shortly after that, and I'm myself also looking for a change. Basically the entire company is in a bit of a "what about our actual product that every customer is complaining about?" Kind of phase, but leadership is rolling full steam ahead with tacking on AI crap on top of everything that literally nobody except for the C-level cares for. *Addendum: not to say I don't view LLM tooling as useful, it undoubtedly is. My main issue is there's 0 nuance involved anymore, we all have to pretend as if it's universally useful literally always and for every single usecase, even when evidence points to the opposite. It can't just be "oh nice, this will save some time for these specific tasks!", no it's "you will be evaluated on how much you use AI and specifically Cursor, whether you're more productive with it or not"
• nitwit005 2y ago
  It's a bit painful how often executives seem to think the key to business success is to do exactly what your competitors are doing.
  • kj4211cash 2y ago
    Love this! A really concise way of summarizing something that's long bugged me about how Silicon Valley operates today.
• rienbdj 2y ago
  Drake's favorite MIME type is application/pdf? Who knew!
• 000ooo000 2y ago
  >If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then... you are a bad leader and should step down. Because you've created a broken culture. This person has seemingly never worked with the kinds of tech people who are happy to point and click their way through their career, rarely taking an interest in automation or a deeper understanding of the tools they use every day. I won't say all of them are stupid, but certainly some of them are.