6 ms·

AI is a change management problem. Using it well requires a competent team, working together with trust and transparency, to build processes that are designed

AI is a change management problem. Using it well requires a competent team, working together with trust and transparency, to build processes that are designed to effectively balance human guidance/expertise with what LLM's are good at. Small teams are doing very big things with it. Most organizations, especially large organizations, are so far away from a healthy culture that AI is amplifying the impact of that toxicity. Executives who interpret "Story Points" as "how much time is that going to take" are asking why everything isn't half a point now. They're so far removed from the process of building maintainable and effective software that they're simply looking for AI to serve as a simple pass through to the bottom line. The recent study showing that 95% of AI pilots failed to deliver ROI is a case study in the ineffectiveness of modern management to actually do their jobs.

grey-area 1y ago
Or maybe it's just not as good as it's been sold to be. I haven't seen any small teams doing very big things with it, which ones are you thinking of?
- sim7c00 1y ago
  you are not wrong. the only 'sane' approaches ive seen with vibe coding is making a PoC to see if some concept works. then rewrite it entirely to make sure its sound. besides just weird or broken code, anything exposed to user input is usually severly lacking sanity checks etc. llms are not useless for coding. but imho letting llms do the coding will not yield production grade code.
  - actinium226 1y ago
    For a second I thought PoC meant Piece of Crap XD
  - b112 1y ago
    Koko the gorilla understood language, but most others of her ilk simlpy make signs because a thing will happen. Move hand this way and a human will give a banana. LLMs have no understanding at all of the underlying language, they've just seen that a billion times a task looks like such and such, so have these tokens after them.
    - SirHumphrey 1y ago
      What does it matter if they have understanding of the underlying language or not? Heck, do humans even have the "understanding of the underlying language". What does that even mean? It's a model. It either predicts usefully or not. How it works is mostly irrelevant.
      - Piskvorrr 1y ago
        In which case...what good is a model that predicts semi-randomly? Oh. ("But it works - when it works" is a tautology, not a useful model)
        anuramat 1y ago
        What does "semi-random" even mean? Are humans not "semi-random" in the same sense?
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - anuramat 1y ago
        Nobody knows what intelligence is, yet somehow everyone has a strong opinion on what it isn't; after all, how could piecewise affine transformations/markov chains/differential equations EVER do X?
      - sim7c00 1y ago
        interesting take. i dont know a lot about grammarz yet in my own language i can speak fairly ok... all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of. copilot told me to cast an int to str to get rid of an error. thanks copilot, it was on kernel code. glad i didnt do it :/. just closed browser and opened man pages. i get nowhere with these things. it feels u need to understand so much its likely less typing to write the code. code is concise and clear after all, mostly unambiguous. language on the other hand... i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
    POC approach seems to work for me lately. It still takes effort to convince manager that it makes sense to devote time to polishing it afterwards, but some of the initial reticence is mitigated. edit: Not a programmer. Just a guy who needs some stuff done for some of the things I need to work on.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  I've seen small teams of a few people write non-trivial software services with AI that are useful enough to get users and potentially viable as a business. We'll see how well they scale.
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  As always, two things can be true. Ignore both the hucksters and the people loudly denigrating everything LLM-related, and somewhere in between you find the reality. I'm in a tiny team of 3 writing b2b software in the energy space and claude code is a godsend for the fiddly-but-brain-dead parts of the job (config stuff, managing cloud infra, one-and-done scripts, little single page dashboards, etc). We've had much less success with the more complex things like maintaining various linear programming/neural net models we've written. It's really good at breaking stuff in subtle ways (like removing L2 regularisation from a VAE while visually it still looks like it's implemented). But personally I still think the juice is worth the squeeze, mainly I find it saves me mental energy I can use elsewhere.
- michaeldoron 1y ago
  A team of 9 people made Base44, a product for vibe-coding apps, and sold it for $80M within 6 months. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vibe-coder-base44-sells-to-wix-for-80m-cash/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vib...
  - piva00 1y ago
    That's just an example of surfing on the incestuous hype, they created a vibe-coded tool that was bought by Wix to help vibe-code other stuff. Is there any example of successful companies created mostly/entirely by "vibe coding" that isn't itself a company in the AI hype? I haven't seen any, all examples so far are similar to yours.
    - wredcoll 1y ago
      Yeah, that's like those crypto/nft "products" that just let you move crypto/nfts around.
  - ponector 1y ago
    A team of 9 created or vibe-coded a product?
  - ambicapter 1y ago
    Their ads are plastered on my youtube so often that I don't trust this product in the slightest. Same with "Motion".
davedx 1y ago
I saw that study, it was indeed about pilots. When do you ever expect a pilot to immediately start driving big revenue increases? The whole thing is a strawman
throwaway1777 1y ago
[dead]
dingdingdang 1y ago
This so many times over, using/introducing AI in an already managerially dysfunctional organisation is like giving automatic weapons to a band of vikings - it will with utmost certitude result in a quickening of their demise. A demise that in the case of a modern dysfunctional organisation would otherwise often be arriving a few years later as a results of complete and utter bureaucratic failure. My experience is that all attempts to elevate technology to a "pivotal force" for the worse is always missing the underlying social and moral failure of the majority (or a small, but important, managerial minority) to act for the common good rather than egotistic self-interest.
- HocusLocus 1y ago
  Vikings acquiring automatic weapons would be a winning strategy, it would not hasten their demise. Vikings with drones would endanger commercial airspace. Vikings with nuclear weapons would be funny, from a distance.
deepburner 1y ago
I'm rather tired of this ai apologism bit where every downside is explained away as "it would've happened anyways". AI destroying people's brains and causing paychosis? They would've gone psychotic anyways! AI causing company culture problems? The company was toxic anyways! Instruments are not inculpable as you think they are.
- anuramat 1y ago
  What's your point? We should be more careful with it? This is the "trial and error" part
TremendousJudge 1y ago
> Executives who interpret "Story Points" as "how much time is that going to take" aside, but I have yet to meet a single person (dev, qa, pm, exec) who doesn't do this.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  so nobody understands why we use "story points" instead of time estimates? I feel like some people do appreciate that its not about the number of points but the quantitive difference between the items up for work.
  - ricardobeat 1y ago
    In my experience the vast majority has completely abandoned the idea of story points or team velocity, they are just an (unnecessary) proxy value for time estimates. And god forbid you suggest something like planning poker to make the estimates somewhat accurate.
lazarus01 1y ago
< small teams are doing very big things? Another claim for AI success, followed by, nothing specific
xg15 1y ago
> Using it well requires a competent team, working together with trust and transparency, to build processes that are designed to effectively balance human guidance/expertise with what LLM's are good at. Small teams are doing very big things with it. This reads a bit like "you're holding it wrong". If you need your team and organization to already be in a perfect state before AI usage will stop doing damage, what is the point of it in the first place. Especially if AI is promoted as a "magic bullet" that will likely especially be uses by teams that are already dysfunctional.
- kledru 1y ago
  "change management problem". We can forget AI specifically for a second -- there are teams and organizations that can adapt to change and there are those that cannot. Some orgs have invested heavily in rigid structures and processes and it probably made a lot of sense that time, but these were never going to survive paradigm shifts.

grey-area 1y ago

Or maybe it's just not as good as it's been sold to be. I haven't seen any small teams doing very big things with it, which ones are you thinking of?

sim7c00 1y ago
you are not wrong. the only 'sane' approaches ive seen with vibe coding is making a PoC to see if some concept works. then rewrite it entirely to make sure its sound. besides just weird or broken code, anything exposed to user input is usually severly lacking sanity checks etc. llms are not useless for coding. but imho letting llms do the coding will not yield production grade code.
- actinium226 1y ago
  For a second I thought PoC meant Piece of Crap XD
- b112 1y ago
  Koko the gorilla understood language, but most others of her ilk simlpy make signs because a thing will happen. Move hand this way and a human will give a banana. LLMs have no understanding at all of the underlying language, they've just seen that a billion times a task looks like such and such, so have these tokens after them.
  - SirHumphrey 1y ago
    What does it matter if they have understanding of the underlying language or not? Heck, do humans even have the "understanding of the underlying language". What does that even mean? It's a model. It either predicts usefully or not. How it works is mostly irrelevant.
    - Piskvorrr 1y ago
      In which case...what good is a model that predicts semi-randomly? Oh. ("But it works - when it works" is a tautology, not a useful model)
      - anuramat 1y ago
        What does "semi-random" even mean? Are humans not "semi-random" in the same sense?
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - anuramat 1y ago
      Nobody knows what intelligence is, yet somehow everyone has a strong opinion on what it isn't; after all, how could piecewise affine transformations/markov chains/differential equations EVER do X?
    - sim7c00 1y ago
      interesting take. i dont know a lot about grammarz yet in my own language i can speak fairly ok... all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of. copilot told me to cast an int to str to get rid of an error. thanks copilot, it was on kernel code. glad i didnt do it :/. just closed browser and opened man pages. i get nowhere with these things. it feels u need to understand so much its likely less typing to write the code. code is concise and clear after all, mostly unambiguous. language on the other hand... i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  POC approach seems to work for me lately. It still takes effort to convince manager that it makes sense to devote time to polishing it afterwards, but some of the initial reticence is mitigated. edit: Not a programmer. Just a guy who needs some stuff done for some of the things I need to work on.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
I've seen small teams of a few people write non-trivial software services with AI that are useful enough to get users and potentially viable as a business. We'll see how well they scale.
bubblyworld 1y ago
As always, two things can be true. Ignore both the hucksters and the people loudly denigrating everything LLM-related, and somewhere in between you find the reality. I'm in a tiny team of 3 writing b2b software in the energy space and claude code is a godsend for the fiddly-but-brain-dead parts of the job (config stuff, managing cloud infra, one-and-done scripts, little single page dashboards, etc). We've had much less success with the more complex things like maintaining various linear programming/neural net models we've written. It's really good at breaking stuff in subtle ways (like removing L2 regularisation from a VAE while visually it still looks like it's implemented). But personally I still think the juice is worth the squeeze, mainly I find it saves me mental energy I can use elsewhere.
michaeldoron 1y ago
A team of 9 people made Base44, a product for vibe-coding apps, and sold it for $80M within 6 months. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vibe-coder-base44-sells-to-wix-for-80m-cash/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vib...
- piva00 1y ago
  That's just an example of surfing on the incestuous hype, they created a vibe-coded tool that was bought by Wix to help vibe-code other stuff. Is there any example of successful companies created mostly/entirely by "vibe coding" that isn't itself a company in the AI hype? I haven't seen any, all examples so far are similar to yours.
  - wredcoll 1y ago
    Yeah, that's like those crypto/nft "products" that just let you move crypto/nfts around.
- ponector 1y ago
  A team of 9 created or vibe-coded a product?
- ambicapter 1y ago
  Their ads are plastered on my youtube so often that I don't trust this product in the slightest. Same with "Motion".

davedx 1y ago

I saw that study, it was indeed about pilots. When do you ever expect a pilot to immediately start driving big revenue increases? The whole thing is a strawman

throwaway1777 1y ago

[dead]

dingdingdang 1y ago

This so many times over, using/introducing AI in an already managerially dysfunctional organisation is like giving automatic weapons to a band of vikings - it will with utmost certitude result in a quickening of their demise. A demise that in the case of a modern dysfunctional organisation would otherwise often be arriving a few years later as a results of complete and utter bureaucratic failure. My experience is that all attempts to elevate technology to a "pivotal force" for the worse is always missing the underlying social and moral failure of the majority (or a small, but important, managerial minority) to act for the common good rather than egotistic self-interest.

HocusLocus 1y ago
Vikings acquiring automatic weapons would be a winning strategy, it would not hasten their demise. Vikings with drones would endanger commercial airspace. Vikings with nuclear weapons would be funny, from a distance.

deepburner 1y ago

I'm rather tired of this ai apologism bit where every downside is explained away as "it would've happened anyways". AI destroying people's brains and causing paychosis? They would've gone psychotic anyways! AI causing company culture problems? The company was toxic anyways! Instruments are not inculpable as you think they are.

anuramat 1y ago
What's your point? We should be more careful with it? This is the "trial and error" part

TremendousJudge 1y ago

> Executives who interpret "Story Points" as "how much time is that going to take" aside, but I have yet to meet a single person (dev, qa, pm, exec) who doesn't do this.

Quarrelsome 1y ago
so nobody understands why we use "story points" instead of time estimates? I feel like some people do appreciate that its not about the number of points but the quantitive difference between the items up for work.
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  In my experience the vast majority has completely abandoned the idea of story points or team velocity, they are just an (unnecessary) proxy value for time estimates. And god forbid you suggest something like planning poker to make the estimates somewhat accurate.

lazarus01 1y ago

< small teams are doing very big things? Another claim for AI success, followed by, nothing specific

xg15 1y ago

> Using it well requires a competent team, working together with trust and transparency, to build processes that are designed to effectively balance human guidance/expertise with what LLM's are good at. Small teams are doing very big things with it. This reads a bit like "you're holding it wrong". If you need your team and organization to already be in a perfect state before AI usage will stop doing damage, what is the point of it in the first place. Especially if AI is promoted as a "magic bullet" that will likely especially be uses by teams that are already dysfunctional.

kledru 1y ago
"change management problem". We can forget AI specifically for a second -- there are teams and organizations that can adapt to change and there are those that cannot. Some orgs have invested heavily in rigid structures and processes and it probably made a lot of sense that time, but these were never going to survive paradigm shifts.