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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

• est 1y ago
  AI tools are just like interns. They cost less and do some jobs well, and sometimes they fail.
• tptacek 1y ago
  they need to understand the actually answer the give me OK. And their butt needs to be on the line if the answer is wrong OK. I'm not seeing the problem.
  • roenxi 1y ago
    The problem seems to be a significant number of software programmers not being confident about what they will be doing to justify drawing a salary.
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      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.
      • layer8 1y ago
        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.
        • chii 1y ago
          only if the assumption of a static world, with static demand is true. the past has shown that this is not the case.
          • layer8 1y ago
            You aren’t addressing the lower-skill part of the argument. In addition, there are fewer farmers than there used to be, despite demand not having been static.
            • chii 1y ago
              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).
              • pixl97 1y ago
                >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.
        • bootsmann 1y ago
          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.
        • 1y ago
      • adrianN 1y ago
        If tooling makes everybody 20% more efficient you can fire 20% of your employees and increase profit.
        • rienbdj 1y ago
          Companies prefer growing revenue to cutting costs typically. Don’t will depend if there are many projects with a good outlook sitting around.
          • donalhunt 1y ago
            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. :(
            • chii 1y ago
              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.
        • sokoloff 1y ago
          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.
        • 1y ago
      • guappa 1y ago
        I don't like that my job is now to fix very verbose slop made by noobs.
      • butlike 1y ago
        I have a theory you never actually save on resources, they just change; but I digress.
    • gonzo41 1y ago
      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.
    • maccard 1y ago
      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.
    • happymellon 1y ago
      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.
  • qsort 1y ago
    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.
• dheatov 1y ago
  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.
  • MoreQARespect 1y ago
    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).
    • RobAley 1y ago
      > 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.
      • MoreQARespect 1y ago
        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.
• octo888 1y ago
  Depends what you're paying. £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?
  • j7ake 1y ago
    Does 20k really make a difference in quality of hire?
    • Valodim 1y ago
      In this case it's like 40%, so I would assume yes
      • bravesoul2 1y ago
        You get what you pay for is a correlation with some causation and a lot of randomness.
        • octo888 1y ago
          True but we can agree on some level if we can agree generally a £30k junior is going to be worse than a £100k senior
          • bravesoul2 1y ago
            Ymmv
    • octo888 1y ago
      Please don't nitpick over the exact number (But yes, salaries in the UK are low. £20k is a lot to a lot of people)
  • favflam 1y ago
    I take it as a P = NP problem. 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.
• sudomateo 1y ago
  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.
  • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    > AI helps humans get to answers faster Well, that is the "vibe" at least. We don't really know for sure. (Maybe ask ChatGPT?)
    • atmosx 1y ago
      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.
      • sudomateo 1y ago
        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?
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      > I've largely replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up, but it hasn't changed anything about what I write. (c) guy on whose website you’re writing this https://x.com/paulg/status/1917320233955602540 https://x.com/paulg/status/1917320233955602540
• nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  > If I pay someone a salary we are quickly approaching the world where you financially can't afford to pay anyone any salary...
  • msgodel 1y ago
    I think you'll have a lot more independent software devs. I think that's good, corporations were surprisingly bad at developing software.
    • t_mahmood 1y ago
      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. Is that too extreme to be real?
      • msgodel 1y ago
        I don't think AI is going away. I'm not sure why you think that.
        • hyperadvanced 1y ago
          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
        • alextingle 1y ago
          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.
• 7bit 1y ago
  > to be responsible for the results 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.
  • trashtester 1y ago
    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.
    • HumanOstrich 1y ago
      I was with you until you casually diagnosed a large group of people with autism using incorrect criteria.
  • motorest 1y ago
    > 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?
• atoav 1y ago
  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.
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  There will be a day when you can reliably put AI’s butt on the line.
  • fendy3002 1y ago
    only if AI's output is somewhat consistent. Like a calculator, nobody will ask for responsibility of calculator. But that day for AI is still long
  • s1mplicissimus 1y ago
    I'm not going to hold my breath for that to happen tbh
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      I wasn’t holding my breath for Turing test passing AI either. We’ll see what the next decade brings.
      • s1mplicissimus 1y ago
        Turing test was broken by a program named "Eliza" decades ago. All it proves is how easy it is to fool people into believing a computer is human.
• eptcyka 1y ago
  Some are comfortable giving answers and solutions they do not actually understand even without the help of AI.
  • darig 1y ago
    [dead]
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  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.
  • vasco 1y ago
    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".
    • bravesoul2 1y ago
      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.
• friendzis 1y ago
  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.
  • Malcolmlisk 1y ago
    > 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.
    • lipowitz 1y ago
      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.
      • butlike 1y ago
        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.
        • klank 1y ago
          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?
• deleted 1y ago
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• stavros 1y ago
  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.
  • dahauns 1y ago
    >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.
    • stavros 1y ago
      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.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • butlike 1y ago
        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.
        • stavros 1y ago
          And who do you think is responsible if the C-levels continue causing the company trouble?
          • pixl97 1y ago
            Generally some random people in IT that had nothing to do with it.
• randomstate 1y ago
  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.
  • b112 1y ago
    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) So maybe IBM is wrong? (Just an amusing edge case)
    • yial 1y ago
      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?
• samzer 1y ago
  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.
• jstummbillig 1y ago
  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.
• mihaaly 1y ago
  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.
• afiodorov 1y ago
  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.
• csomar 1y ago
  > 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.
• coldtea 1y ago
  >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. Given the prevalence of outsourcing to random remote companies, this is a moot point for many corporations.
• whateveracct 1y ago
  The real money AI is after isn't net-new but rather a chunk of people's salaries. Give us $X/year for our tool that makes your employee "more efficient" (more fungible tbh). Subtract that $X/year from the salary you pay. That's their big bet.
  • ww-picard-do 1y ago
    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.
• mmsc 1y ago
  >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
• deleted 1y ago
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