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You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think
by slopinthebag 9mo ago
You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped.
LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at their current state they are not capable of replacing most knowledge workers. Remember, even computers as a whole didn't measurably impact the economy for years after their adoption. The real world is a messy place and hard to predict!
- throwaway613746 9mo ago> "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it" If my boss asked me a question like this my reply would be "exactly what you told me to build, check jira". If you want to know if I'm more productive - look at the metrics. Isn't that what you pay Atlassian for? Maybe you could ask their AI...
- bluGill 9mo agoAs a senior engineer sometimes the system shows I did nothing because I was helping others. sometimes I get the really hard problem -'the isn't speller teh' type bugs are more common than thread race conditions - but a lot faster to solve.
- throwaway613746 9mo ago[dead]
- echelon 9mo agoNo. They're firing high paid seniors and replacing them with low pay juniors. This is IBM we're talking about. The "limits of AI" bit is just smokescreen. Firing seniors: > Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs would impact a relatively low single-digit percentage of the company’s global workforce, and when combined with new hiring, would leave IBM’s U.S. headcount roughly flat. New workers will use AI: > While she admitted that many of the responsibilities that previously defined entry-level jobs can now be automated, IBM has since rewritten its roles across sectors to account for AI fluency. For example, software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers, and HR staffers will work more on intervening with chatbots, rather than having to answer every question.
- slopinthebag 9mo agoWhere does it say those cuts were senior software developers? Obviously they want new workers to use AI but I don't really see anything to suggest they're so successful with AI that they're firing all their seniors and hiring juniors to be meatbags for LLMs.
- fragmede 9mo agoprobably aren't going to find a lot of articles discussing how water is wet, either.
- slopinthebag 9mo agoLOL great example. There are tons of articles on this topic: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet https://centreforinquiry.ca/keiths-conundrums-is-water-wet https://centreforinquiry.ca/keiths-conundrums-is-water-wet https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1725,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-17... http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6097 http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6097 https://parknotes.substack.com/p/is-water-wet-or-does-it-just-make https://parknotes.substack.com/p/is-water-wet-or-does-it-jus... ...etc. Turns out, it's not a solved question!
- xp84 9mo agoThis just doesn't make any sense. Juniors + AI just does not equal seniors, except for prototyping greenfield projects. Who knows about 2 months from now, it moves fast and stuff, but not right now.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- robocat 9mo ago> just doesn't make any sense I suspect the gap is that you don't know enough about IBM's business model. When something doesn't make sense, a very common cause is a lack of context: many things can be extremely sensible for a business to do; things which appear insane from an outsider's point of view.
- johnsmith1840 9mo agoI bet you the predictions are largely correct but technology doesn't care about funding timelines and egos. It will come in its own time. It's like trying to make fusion happen only by spending more money. It helps but it doesn't fundamentally solve thr pace of true innovation. I've been saying for years now that the next AI breakthrough could come from big tech but it also has just a likely chance of comming from a smart kid with a whiteboard.
- echelon 9mo ago> I've been saying for years now that the next AI breakthrough could come from big tech but it also has just a likely chance of comming from a smart kid with a whiteboard. It comes from the company best equipped with capital and infra. If some university invents a new approach, one of the nimble hyperscalers / foundation model companies will gobble it up. This is why capital is being spent. That is the only thing that matters: positioning to take advantage of the adoption curve.
- johnsmith1840 9mo agoYes scaling is always capitol hungry but the innovation itself is not
- masterlee_fn 8mo ago[dead]
- slopinthebag 9mo agoWell, the predictions are tied to the timelines. If someone predicts that AI will take over writing code sometime in the future I think a lot of people would agree. The pushback comes from suggesting it's current LLMs and that the timeline is months and not decades.
- masterlee_fn 8mo ago[dead]
- edoceo 9mo ago> measurable productivity Which measure? Like when folk say something is more "efficient" it's more time-efficient to fly but one trades other efficiency. Efficiency, like productivity needs a second word with it to properly communicate. Whtys more productive? Lines of code (a weak measure). Features shipped? Bugs fixed? Time by company saved? Time for client? Shareholders value (lame). I don't know the answer but this year (2026) I'm gonna see if LLM is better at tax prep than my 10yr CPA. So that test is my time vs $6k USD.
- bluGill 9mo agoTime could be very expensive as mistakes on taxes can be fraud resulting in prison time. Mostly they understand people make mistakes - but they need to look like honest mistakes and llm may not. remember you sign your taxes as correct to the best of your knowledge - your CPA is admitting you outsourced understanding to an expert, something they accept. However if you sign alone you are saying you understand it all even if you don't.
- belter 9mo agoI used to write bugs in 8 hours. Now I write the same bugs in 4. My Productivity doubled. \s
- SoftTalker 9mo agoEven better, I write more bugs in 4 hours than I used to in 8.
- collingreen 9mo agoAnd the bugs take me WAY longer to find and fix now!
- pfdietz 9mo agoA 10x employee creates enough bugs to keep 10 other employees busy.
- 9mo ago
- ChadMoran 9mo ago[flagged]
- slopinthebag 9mo agoNice, yeah I feel like there's a big opportunity for tech workers who are product-adjacent to use LLMs to get up to speed building SaaS etc. Are you worried by any of those claims about SaaS being dead because of AI? lol
- ChadMoran 9mo ago[flagged]
- slopinthebag 9mo agoLooks cool. Are you a Rivian owner who solved their own problem or did you stumble upon it randomly??
- ChadMoran 9mo agoThanks! I used to own a Tesla and there were similar platforms out there. Bought a Rivian and wanted something like that. I started building this before AI-assisted coding was very popular. But it greatly increased my productivity.
- slopinthebag 9mo agoThere is that quote "there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see". I feel like there is a solid variation with solid business opportunities instead of cathedrals haha. I've found AI to be a big productivity boost for myself, but I don't really use it to generate much actual code. Maybe it could do more for me, idk, but I also don't feel like I'm being left behind. I actually enjoy writing code, but hate most other programming tasks so it's been nice to just focus on what I like. Feels good to have it generate a UI skeleton for me so I can just fill out the styles and stuff. Or figure out stupid build config and errors. Etc etc. Anyways congrats on the product. I know a lot of people are negative about productivity claims and I'm certainly skeptical of a lot of them too, but if you asked most programmers 5 years ago if a super-autocomplete which could generate working code snippets and debug issues in a project would boost productivity everyone would say yes lol. People are annoyed that its overhyped, but there should still be room for reasonable hype imo.
- milchek 9mo agoI think for a lot of folks it basically comes down to just using AI to make the tasks they have to do easier and to free up time for themselves. I’d argue the majority use AI this way. The minority “10x” workers who are using it to churn through more tasks are the motivated ones driving real business value being added - but let’s be honest, in a soulless enterprise 9-5 these folks are few and far between.
- sarchertech 9mo agoSure but why haven’t you seen a drastic increase in single person startups. Why are there fewer games launched in steam this January than last?
- rustystump 9mo agoBecause ai doesnt work like this “make me money” or “make stardew valley in space”. The hard part is the painful exploration and necessary taste to produce something useful. The number of these kind of people did not increase with ai. Eg, ai is a big multiplier but that doesnt mean it will translate to “more” in the way people think.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- sarchertech 9mo agoIt doesn’t need to be useful or a good game to launch on steam. Surely if it was a “big multiplier” 5-10x, it would be noticeably impacting steam launches. Now if it’s something closer to 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.
- copperx 9mo agoHaven't you? I have! In another reply, I noted the avalanche of WisprFlow competitors, as just one example.
- 9mo ago
- bawolff 9mo agoMeh, i think a lot of companies just wanted an excuse to do lay-offs without the bad press, and AI was convinent.
- shusaku 9mo ago“AI will steal your job” never made sense. If your company is doing bad, sure maybe you fire people after automating their job. But we’re in a growth oriented economic system. If the company is doing good, and AI increases productivity, you actually will hire more people because every person is that much more of a return on investment
- benreesman 9mo agoNo one has built business AI that is flat correct to the standards of a high redundancy human organization. Individuals make mistakes in air traffic control towers, but as a cumulative outcome it's a scandal if airplanes collide midair. Even in contested airspace. The current infrastructure never gets there. There is no improvement path from MCP to air traffic control. It's hard work and patience and math.