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What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never se

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

layer8 7mo ago
> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. It has often been the case for technologies though, like “now we’re doing everything in $language and $technology”. If you see LLM coding as a technology in that vein, it’s not a completely new phenomenon, although it does affect developers differently.
- kjkjadksj 7mo ago
  Well the tech or the language had some feature to it that lead you to using it. By definition LLM coding doesn’t. It is like the job requirement turned into “ask jeff to write all your code and if you don’t we won’t hire you.”
  - layer8 7mo ago
    Technologies were imposed by management whether it made sense or not. Like, “all data exchange formats now have to use XML”, or “all applications must be J2EE now”, because it was the new hot thing. “You” weren’t making that choice, management imposed it. That’s the parallel I’m drawing.
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. One person hand coding and one person having Claude still results in the same output that is compatible with each other. This is more like mandating that you use vim. I’ve never some something like that before in 20+ years.
      - layer8 7mo ago
        > That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. Absolutely not, a lot was done just because it was pushed as the current fashion and advertised to be solving problems that either weren’t applicable to the concrete use case or that it didn’t actually solve.
        sarchertech 7mo ago
        You’re not understanding what I’m saying. If you as a company want to do OOP, having one guy writing everything in imperative style hinders everyone else because their code has to interact with his. AI isn’t like this because the final output is the same as hand coding.
- augusto-moura 7mo ago
  Language and technology are normal, but we are talking about a metered code editor, nobody have asked me to "use X hours of IntellijIDEA" in the past, or "use git enough or be fired". Tools are never required to be used when they are not needed
luisgvv 7mo ago
I'm just using Copilot CLI for mindless stuff and set it to the premium models to meet the quota, as long as they can't see the prompts I think I should be fine
- butlike 7mo ago
  You're not going to get fired. Don't worry about it :)
  - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    Almost 3 years too late for that warning.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- EdwardDiego 7mo ago
  Same, but with Opus 4.6.
- johntash 7mo ago
  Not sure about copilot, but most enterprise plans do offer a way to export all prompts to a company siem.
jimmyjazz14 7mo ago
Yeah, I found this strange as well, if the tech is so amazing why do developers need to be forced to use it?
- dash2 7mo ago
  Maybe there's a positive externality: your individual learning percolates to others and benefits the firm as a whole.
  - whoknowsidont 7mo ago
    What is there to learn? If anything developers are still the one's training and enhancing the models by giving them more feedback cycles and what works and what doesn't.
- debatem1 7mo ago
  I'm encouraging my folks to try it pretty hard because A) I've personally seen the productivity gains and B) using it is at first deeply weird/uncomfortable. Sometimes you've got to convince people to push through that kind of thing.
  - toomuchtodo 7mo ago
    How you objectively measuring success? 93% of Developers Use AI Coding Tools. Productivity Hasn't Moved. - https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-coding-tools.-productivity-hasnt-moved./ https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi... - March 4th, 2026
    - nightski 7mo ago
      They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.
      - tehjoker 7mo ago
jmalicki 7mo ago
I've also never seen an optional tool become a step change like this Even moving from assembly language to compiled languages was not as much of a step change.
mh- 7mo ago
The only thing I've mandated for engineers is that folks give it a try occasionally, as models, best practices, and tooling improves. I'm currently tracking exactly two numeric metrics: total MAUs (to track the aforementioned), and total DAUs (to gauge adoption and rightsize seat-licensed contracts.)
- Henchman21 7mo ago
  Whats your plan for when someone flatly refuses?
  - mh- 7mo ago
    I'll cross that bridge when I get there. No one who works for me has refused to be paid to try out a new technology when I ensure the time is set aside for them to do so.
- jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
  Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"? If the benefit is there people will use it or get left behind, there's no sense having a mandate that people resentfully try the new tooling. Imagine you had a developer who writes Java using vim. It sounds insane but they are just as productive as everyone else. Then you mandate they have to try IntelliJ every quarter, just to see if maybe they like it now. You're just going to piss them off and reduce their productivity by mandating their workflow. FWIW in the face of these kind of mandates I have been using tokens but ignoring the output. So it's costing my employer money and they have a warped metric of whether the tool is actually useful.
  - ianm218 7mo ago
    > Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"? If AI makes an employee 10X more productive they get a slight pay raise maybe, but the company makes substantially more money or gets substantially more output. So there is a large difference in incentives.
zephen 7mo ago
I don't doubt you, but I'm out of the loop. Who does this?
- forgetfulness 7mo ago
  My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure. A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems. Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.
  - genthree 7mo ago
    I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean this, or did the LLM just prompt them to include it and they thought sure, I guess that's good?") [EDIT] Oh and much of your post rings true for my org. They operate at a fraction the speed they could because of organizational dysfunction and failure to use what's already available to them as far as processes and tech, but are rushing toward LLMs, LOL. Yeah, guys, the slowness has nothing to do with how fast code is written, and I'm suuuuure you'll do a great job of integrating those tools effectively when you're failing at the basics....
    - forgetfulness 7mo ago
      Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring. LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button. Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.
HolyLampshade 7mo ago
> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or cost cutting they can be.
- genthree 7mo ago
  I think this is the result of a c-suite that has never actually done the work of the businesses they're running. The MBAificiation of management. Of course they constantly do brain-dead shit, they literally don't have a clue how anything actually works in "their" own business.
  - stackbutterflow 7mo ago
    They've been vibe-driving businesses long before we've started vibe-coding software.
    - gopher_space 7mo ago
      There weren't really any failure states for the ZIRP "lifestyle CEO". If you remember old black and white movies about pigeons from psych 101 it's been that level of conditioning for how many years now? If your CEO doesn't look like a taxi dispatcher he's just moving his wings around waiting for a food pellet.
  - HolyLampshade 7mo ago
    I was trying to think of a way to word this exact argument. I think it’s especially easy when your business technology is not your primary means of revenue generation. Having these execs understand how things work is significantly less critical in these scenarios, so it becomes much easier to hire for alternative characteristics (golf game, pedigree, gender, whatever).
- rurp 7mo ago
afpx 7mo ago
It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.
- komali2 7mo ago
  > Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a ceo@thatcompany.com email and nobody would notice.
  - bikelang 7mo ago
    We’d probably get better outcomes too.
    - plagiarist 7mo ago
      For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.
      - theandrewbailey 7mo ago
        > Shareholders would be mad, I bet. But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!
- throwaway29130 7mo ago
  Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.) This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week." They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span. When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon. I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.
genthree 7mo ago
We're doing that in my office, forced Cursor use. A good chunk of the "edited by AI" lines in my history were just auto-completing about the same as a traditional intellisense-alike would do (and actually Cursor doesn't seem to supply that, which is frequently annoying and wastes my time, in particular when I need to make sure it hasn't hallucinated a method or property on an object it should be able to "see" the definition of, which it does constantly; IDK maybe there's a setting somewhere, but I don't have to fiddle with settings in vanilla VSCode to get that...) It's actually kinda useful in some cases, but the UI is terrible and it needs to integrate much better with existing tools that are superior to it for specific purposes, before I'll be happy using it. I'd say the productivity gains are a wash, for me, so far. Plus it's entirely too memory-hungry, I'd just come to accept that a text editor takes a couple GB now (SIGH), and here it comes taking way more than that.
hibikir 7mo ago
It's using a bad tool to try to aim at something reasonable-ish: Developers not taking advantage of the tools in places where it's very easy to get use out of them. I have coworkers like that: One spent 3 days researching a bug that Claude found in 10 minutes by pointing it at the logs in the time window and the codebase. And he didn't even find the bug, when Claude nailed it in one. But is this something that is best done top to bottom, with a big report, counting tokens? Hell no. This is something that is better found, and tackled at the team level. But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not. And that's how you find people playing JIRA games and such. My worse example was a VP has decided that looking at the burndown charts from each team under them, and using their shape as a reasonable metric is a good idea. It's all natural signs of a total lack of trust, and thinking you can solve all of this from the top.
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  The thing is we’ve always had people who spend more time on their tooling or learn different tools and perform better. I’ve seen people use notepad and I’ve seen people who are so good at vim that they look like they’re on editing code directly with their mind. Your particular example is extreme and my guess is the coworker is just not great at debugging. I use Claude all the time for finding bugs, but it fails fairly frequently though. I think there’s probably advantage to having some people who don’t use it that often, so you have someone to turn to when it fails. I’m definitely not exercising my debugging skills as much as I used to and I’m fairly confident they’ve atrophied.
  - toraway 7mo ago
    That, and an objective comparison measuring time saving should include all time that went into learning, configuring, maintaining the tool. And ideally a sample large enough to capture any wasted time from dead ends in other tasks where the tool may actually fail to solve the problem. I’ve definitely lost a couple hours here and there from when it felt like I was right on the verge of CC fixing something but never actually got there and finally had to just do it myself anyway.
- 7mo ago
diehunde 7mo ago
As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.
- zrail 7mo ago
  It's baffling, to be honest. I'm at a fintech that is currently pushing very hard at this, but in the same breath talking about how we're not a pure software play. I just don't understand where they're coming from.
  - oro44 7mo ago
    irrational exuberance
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  I’m at a big tech company top and essentially no one is a true believer more than 3 or 4 levels down from the top. We’re all just trying to keep our use metrics high enough to not get noticed. But for those top layers, I’ve never seen so much FOMO in all my life. We’re a very slow moving company but they act like we’ve got 2 weeks to go “AI first” or we’re dead in the water. I’ve never seen such a successful hype cycle. I’m pretty sure it’s the bots that are accelerating it so far behind a normal hype cycle.
  - AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
    Maybe AI is really good for vibe-coding bots that amplify FOMO?
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      It’s really good at spitting out prose that is frequently good enough to pass as human and bypass spam filters.
- 7mo ago
jacobsenscott 7mo ago
> t just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately. This is exactly what's happening. The top 5 or 6 companies in the s&p 500 are running a very sophisticated marketing/pressure campaign to convince every c-suite down stream that they need to force AI on their entire organization or die. It's working great. CEOs don't get fired for following the herd.
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago
  ~40-50% of the S&P500 rely on this continuing. S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384002 - March 2026 > No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer. -- Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson) OpenAI Needs a Trillion Dollars in the Next Four Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45394071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45394071 - September 2025 (8 comments)
  - karmakurtisaani 7mo ago
    Elon Musk is planning to put his AI company into the SpaceX IPO, and accelerate getting it into the major indices, effectively making pension funds, banks and individual investors his bag holders. Patric Boyle has a video on this in case you care for the details.
- fuzzfactor 7mo ago
  I guess it's possible for the top companies to have spent so much already, that now the best move is to convince the next tier to do the same otherwise those competitiors may pull ahead without such a financial handicap.
whateveracct 7mo ago
Yes it's very weird - why is my CEO being so nosy about my text editor all of a sudden? Stay in your lane, buddy.
suhputt 7mo ago
[dead]
bondarchuk 7mo ago
>I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool If you broaden the comparison (only a little bit) it looks suspiciously like employees being forced to train their own replacement (be that other employees, or factory automation), a regular occurrence.
- somenameforme 7mo ago
  Yeah this is the thing I think many don't want to see. Imagine a bunch of farm laborers being trained to use a tractor/reaper early on its development. Certainly they'd think it's cool and convenient, because it is. But if it works out, then most of those farm laborers are now obsolete, and a handful of them can now replace the rest. And indeed this is why agricultural employment went from the majority of jobs to a footnote.
PedroBatista 7mo ago
Tech directors, CEOs, managers, etc tend to be people with a certain personality and ( learned behaviors/thinking ) just like "technical people". Yes, they tend to be incredible gullible to certain things, over-simplistic and over-confident but also very "agile" when it comes to sweep their failures under the rug and move on to keep their own neck in one piece. At this point in time even the median CEO knows AI has been way overhyped and they over invested to a point of absolute financial insanity. The first line of defense about the pressure to deliver is to mandate their minions to use it as much as possible. We spent a fortune on this over-rated Michelin star reservation, and now you kids are going to absolutely enjoy it, like it or not goddammit!
khriss 7mo ago
This is largely due to the age old fact that corporations rarely make decisions based on actual data, introspection, and good judgment. Usually the decision is made first and then the justifications are invented afterwards. In this case, every executive is terrified of being "left out" in the AI race. As we saw with the mass layoffs across companies, most of CEO decision making is just adhering to herd behavior. So it is literally better for execs to have shoveled a shit ton of money into 'strategic' AI initiatives and have them fail than potentially deal with the potentially remote chance of some other exec or company succeeding with 'AI enabled transformation'. What makes it even more fun is that nobody really has a good understanding of how to measure the ROI of AI. Hence we have people burning a lot of money due to FOMO and no easy way of measuring the outcome, which is usually how the foundations for good Ponzi schemes are laid. This is unlikely to end well. However, as usual, it's us, the common plebs, who will suffer regardless of outcome.
cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
[dead]
abkolan 7mo ago
A certain YC company fired a few employees for not using AI, the CEO bragged about it on X and incidentally it was a crypto company.
jfreds 7mo ago
I am seeing this at my work right now. They are about to start using token consumption as _part_ of the performance review process. Obviously this is a coarse and problematic proxy for productivity. OTOH, it’s an attempt to address a real problem. There are people who are in fact falling behind (I’m talking literally editing code in notepad), and we can either let them get PIPped eventually, or try to bring them along. There is a real “activation energy” required to learning new tools, and some people need an excuse/permission. Not saying that token count is a GOOD signal, but I haven’t heard many better ideas
1dontnkow_ 7mo ago
I was thinking about this but sometimes its hard to distinguish between what the marketing of OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies say and what actually all the companies are doing throughout the world. Any thoughts on that? For example even the layoffs, nowadays seem to be because of AI or so they said but just a year or two ago there were quite some layoffs and people said "its because of the high demand in COVID and now its over, or Ukraine or inflation" but then that ignores that exactly during that time earlier were there many layofs but it was super easy "Oh COVID and supply chain!" and earlier maybe something else. Surely there are also economic booms but when did the whole world jsut suddenly started seriously listening to public statements of companies (and that jsut a few with no real income, just money from VCs) and nobody shows us the real data of whats actually happening? E.g. the companies saying they fired 10K due to AI, how much did they actually now direct their budget to AI? How many products are actually being build? Is the productivity the same? Are the customers thinking that support is suddenly amazing or actually it has seriously dropepd in quality? Or no change at all? Is it a company like KFC, your local hardwore chain store, financial isntitutions, truck manufactures or anothet AI company with funding using another AIs company with other funding using now one more AIs company products up to the power suppliers? For me it seems that its definitely impacting things and a cool technology to be more productive (for example it helps me a lot daily but its not like my life really changed) but the other things I haven't seen yet. Another point each actual AI generated app is either something akin to a toilet game or not really working (like the C compiler). So where are the amazing enterprise complicated apps fully built via agents? In banks, in government, in apps that respect GDPR and actually are secure but proudly build only or mostly with agents? The only ones, not even secure, are other AI apps to do AI stuff but its whole value it says is to be more productive in the "real" economy but it still hasn't done it yet anywhere. People still struggle with Word or AWS infra or debugging why some specific user cant log in with their custom auth provider at some esoteric region with their laws and audits and GDPR variant. So one side says its basically a tool from God and they never have created more stuff but on the other hand the other group analyzing blood work, delivering food, writing reports, etc uses it a bit or not at all but all the 95% of problems they had are there with some new ones. Also I'm afraid most of them just write now their email better or with more volume, but no real work is getting done. So yeah maybe my confusion simply lies in that fact that I have a real job and nobody can keep up with all the slop and shit generated online anymore. I'm open to feedback or learn.
MichaelRo 7mo ago
>> It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately. Exactly this: "Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens" : https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-250k-ai-tokens-nvidia-compute-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-...

layer8 7mo ago

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. It has often been the case for technologies though, like “now we’re doing everything in $language and $technology”. If you see LLM coding as a technology in that vein, it’s not a completely new phenomenon, although it does affect developers differently.

kjkjadksj 7mo ago
Well the tech or the language had some feature to it that lead you to using it. By definition LLM coding doesn’t. It is like the job requirement turned into “ask jeff to write all your code and if you don’t we won’t hire you.”
- layer8 7mo ago
  Technologies were imposed by management whether it made sense or not. Like, “all data exchange formats now have to use XML”, or “all applications must be J2EE now”, because it was the new hot thing. “You” weren’t making that choice, management imposed it. That’s the parallel I’m drawing.
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. One person hand coding and one person having Claude still results in the same output that is compatible with each other. This is more like mandating that you use vim. I’ve never some something like that before in 20+ years.
    - layer8 7mo ago
      > That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. Absolutely not, a lot was done just because it was pushed as the current fashion and advertised to be solving problems that either weren’t applicable to the concrete use case or that it didn’t actually solve.
      - sarchertech 7mo ago
        You’re not understanding what I’m saying. If you as a company want to do OOP, having one guy writing everything in imperative style hinders everyone else because their code has to interact with his. AI isn’t like this because the final output is the same as hand coding.
augusto-moura 7mo ago
Language and technology are normal, but we are talking about a metered code editor, nobody have asked me to "use X hours of IntellijIDEA" in the past, or "use git enough or be fired". Tools are never required to be used when they are not needed

luisgvv 7mo ago

I'm just using Copilot CLI for mindless stuff and set it to the premium models to meet the quota, as long as they can't see the prompts I think I should be fine

butlike 7mo ago
You're not going to get fired. Don't worry about it :)
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  Almost 3 years too late for that warning.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
EdwardDiego 7mo ago
Same, but with Opus 4.6.
johntash 7mo ago
Not sure about copilot, but most enterprise plans do offer a way to export all prompts to a company siem.

jimmyjazz14 7mo ago

Yeah, I found this strange as well, if the tech is so amazing why do developers need to be forced to use it?

dash2 7mo ago
Maybe there's a positive externality: your individual learning percolates to others and benefits the firm as a whole.
- whoknowsidont 7mo ago
  What is there to learn? If anything developers are still the one's training and enhancing the models by giving them more feedback cycles and what works and what doesn't.
debatem1 7mo ago
I'm encouraging my folks to try it pretty hard because A) I've personally seen the productivity gains and B) using it is at first deeply weird/uncomfortable. Sometimes you've got to convince people to push through that kind of thing.
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago
  How you objectively measuring success? 93% of Developers Use AI Coding Tools. Productivity Hasn't Moved. - https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-coding-tools.-productivity-hasnt-moved./ https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi... - March 4th, 2026
  - nightski 7mo ago
    They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.
    - tehjoker 7mo ago

jmalicki 7mo ago

I've also never seen an optional tool become a step change like this Even moving from assembly language to compiled languages was not as much of a step change.

mh- 7mo ago

The only thing I've mandated for engineers is that folks give it a try occasionally, as models, best practices, and tooling improves. I'm currently tracking exactly two numeric metrics: total MAUs (to track the aforementioned), and total DAUs (to gauge adoption and rightsize seat-licensed contracts.)

Henchman21 7mo ago
Whats your plan for when someone flatly refuses?
- mh- 7mo ago
  I'll cross that bridge when I get there. No one who works for me has refused to be paid to try out a new technology when I ensure the time is set aside for them to do so.
jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"? If the benefit is there people will use it or get left behind, there's no sense having a mandate that people resentfully try the new tooling. Imagine you had a developer who writes Java using vim. It sounds insane but they are just as productive as everyone else. Then you mandate they have to try IntelliJ every quarter, just to see if maybe they like it now. You're just going to piss them off and reduce their productivity by mandating their workflow. FWIW in the face of these kind of mandates I have been using tokens but ignoring the output. So it's costing my employer money and they have a warped metric of whether the tool is actually useful.
- ianm218 7mo ago
  > Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"? If AI makes an employee 10X more productive they get a slight pay raise maybe, but the company makes substantially more money or gets substantially more output. So there is a large difference in incentives.

zephen 7mo ago

I don't doubt you, but I'm out of the loop. Who does this?

forgetfulness 7mo ago
My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure. A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems. Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.
- genthree 7mo ago
  I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean this, or did the LLM just prompt them to include it and they thought sure, I guess that's good?") [EDIT] Oh and much of your post rings true for my org. They operate at a fraction the speed they could because of organizational dysfunction and failure to use what's already available to them as far as processes and tech, but are rushing toward LLMs, LOL. Yeah, guys, the slowness has nothing to do with how fast code is written, and I'm suuuuure you'll do a great job of integrating those tools effectively when you're failing at the basics....
  - forgetfulness 7mo ago
    Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring. LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button. Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.

HolyLampshade 7mo ago

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or cost cutting they can be.

genthree 7mo ago
I think this is the result of a c-suite that has never actually done the work of the businesses they're running. The MBAificiation of management. Of course they constantly do brain-dead shit, they literally don't have a clue how anything actually works in "their" own business.
- stackbutterflow 7mo ago
  They've been vibe-driving businesses long before we've started vibe-coding software.
  - gopher_space 7mo ago
    There weren't really any failure states for the ZIRP "lifestyle CEO". If you remember old black and white movies about pigeons from psych 101 it's been that level of conditioning for how many years now? If your CEO doesn't look like a taxi dispatcher he's just moving his wings around waiting for a food pellet.
- HolyLampshade 7mo ago
  I was trying to think of a way to word this exact argument. I think it’s especially easy when your business technology is not your primary means of revenue generation. Having these execs understand how things work is significantly less critical in these scenarios, so it becomes much easier to hire for alternative characteristics (golf game, pedigree, gender, whatever).
rurp 7mo ago

afpx 7mo ago

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

komali2 7mo ago
> Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a ceo@thatcompany.com email and nobody would notice.
- bikelang 7mo ago
  We’d probably get better outcomes too.
  - plagiarist 7mo ago
    For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.
    - theandrewbailey 7mo ago
      > Shareholders would be mad, I bet. But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!
throwaway29130 7mo ago
Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.) This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week." They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span. When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon. I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.

genthree 7mo ago

We're doing that in my office, forced Cursor use. A good chunk of the "edited by AI" lines in my history were just auto-completing about the same as a traditional intellisense-alike would do (and actually Cursor doesn't seem to supply that, which is frequently annoying and wastes my time, in particular when I need to make sure it hasn't hallucinated a method or property on an object it should be able to "see" the definition of, which it does constantly; IDK maybe there's a setting somewhere, but I don't have to fiddle with settings in vanilla VSCode to get that...) It's actually kinda useful in some cases, but the UI is terrible and it needs to integrate much better with existing tools that are superior to it for specific purposes, before I'll be happy using it. I'd say the productivity gains are a wash, for me, so far. Plus it's entirely too memory-hungry, I'd just come to accept that a text editor takes a couple GB now (SIGH), and here it comes taking way more than that.

hibikir 7mo ago

It's using a bad tool to try to aim at something reasonable-ish: Developers not taking advantage of the tools in places where it's very easy to get use out of them. I have coworkers like that: One spent 3 days researching a bug that Claude found in 10 minutes by pointing it at the logs in the time window and the codebase. And he didn't even find the bug, when Claude nailed it in one. But is this something that is best done top to bottom, with a big report, counting tokens? Hell no. This is something that is better found, and tackled at the team level. But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not. And that's how you find people playing JIRA games and such. My worse example was a VP has decided that looking at the burndown charts from each team under them, and using their shape as a reasonable metric is a good idea. It's all natural signs of a total lack of trust, and thinking you can solve all of this from the top.

sarchertech 7mo ago
The thing is we’ve always had people who spend more time on their tooling or learn different tools and perform better. I’ve seen people use notepad and I’ve seen people who are so good at vim that they look like they’re on editing code directly with their mind. Your particular example is extreme and my guess is the coworker is just not great at debugging. I use Claude all the time for finding bugs, but it fails fairly frequently though. I think there’s probably advantage to having some people who don’t use it that often, so you have someone to turn to when it fails. I’m definitely not exercising my debugging skills as much as I used to and I’m fairly confident they’ve atrophied.
- toraway 7mo ago
  That, and an objective comparison measuring time saving should include all time that went into learning, configuring, maintaining the tool. And ideally a sample large enough to capture any wasted time from dead ends in other tasks where the tool may actually fail to solve the problem. I’ve definitely lost a couple hours here and there from when it felt like I was right on the verge of CC fixing something but never actually got there and finally had to just do it myself anyway.
7mo ago

diehunde 7mo ago

As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.

zrail 7mo ago
It's baffling, to be honest. I'm at a fintech that is currently pushing very hard at this, but in the same breath talking about how we're not a pure software play. I just don't understand where they're coming from.
- oro44 7mo ago
  irrational exuberance
sarchertech 7mo ago
I’m at a big tech company top and essentially no one is a true believer more than 3 or 4 levels down from the top. We’re all just trying to keep our use metrics high enough to not get noticed. But for those top layers, I’ve never seen so much FOMO in all my life. We’re a very slow moving company but they act like we’ve got 2 weeks to go “AI first” or we’re dead in the water. I’ve never seen such a successful hype cycle. I’m pretty sure it’s the bots that are accelerating it so far behind a normal hype cycle.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
  Maybe AI is really good for vibe-coding bots that amplify FOMO?
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    It’s really good at spitting out prose that is frequently good enough to pass as human and bypass spam filters.
7mo ago

jacobsenscott 7mo ago

> t just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately. This is exactly what's happening. The top 5 or 6 companies in the s&p 500 are running a very sophisticated marketing/pressure campaign to convince every c-suite down stream that they need to force AI on their entire organization or die. It's working great. CEOs don't get fired for following the herd.

toomuchtodo 7mo ago
~40-50% of the S&P500 rely on this continuing. S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384002 - March 2026 > No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer. -- Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson) OpenAI Needs a Trillion Dollars in the Next Four Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45394071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45394071 - September 2025 (8 comments)
- karmakurtisaani 7mo ago
  Elon Musk is planning to put his AI company into the SpaceX IPO, and accelerate getting it into the major indices, effectively making pension funds, banks and individual investors his bag holders. Patric Boyle has a video on this in case you care for the details.
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
I guess it's possible for the top companies to have spent so much already, that now the best move is to convince the next tier to do the same otherwise those competitiors may pull ahead without such a financial handicap.

whateveracct 7mo ago

Yes it's very weird - why is my CEO being so nosy about my text editor all of a sudden? Stay in your lane, buddy.

suhputt 7mo ago

[dead]

bondarchuk 7mo ago

>I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool If you broaden the comparison (only a little bit) it looks suspiciously like employees being forced to train their own replacement (be that other employees, or factory automation), a regular occurrence.

somenameforme 7mo ago
Yeah this is the thing I think many don't want to see. Imagine a bunch of farm laborers being trained to use a tractor/reaper early on its development. Certainly they'd think it's cool and convenient, because it is. But if it works out, then most of those farm laborers are now obsolete, and a handful of them can now replace the rest. And indeed this is why agricultural employment went from the majority of jobs to a footnote.

PedroBatista 7mo ago

Tech directors, CEOs, managers, etc tend to be people with a certain personality and ( learned behaviors/thinking ) just like "technical people". Yes, they tend to be incredible gullible to certain things, over-simplistic and over-confident but also very "agile" when it comes to sweep their failures under the rug and move on to keep their own neck in one piece. At this point in time even the median CEO knows AI has been way overhyped and they over invested to a point of absolute financial insanity. The first line of defense about the pressure to deliver is to mandate their minions to use it as much as possible. We spent a fortune on this over-rated Michelin star reservation, and now you kids are going to absolutely enjoy it, like it or not goddammit!

khriss 7mo ago

This is largely due to the age old fact that corporations rarely make decisions based on actual data, introspection, and good judgment. Usually the decision is made first and then the justifications are invented afterwards. In this case, every executive is terrified of being "left out" in the AI race. As we saw with the mass layoffs across companies, most of CEO decision making is just adhering to herd behavior. So it is literally better for execs to have shoveled a shit ton of money into 'strategic' AI initiatives and have them fail than potentially deal with the potentially remote chance of some other exec or company succeeding with 'AI enabled transformation'. What makes it even more fun is that nobody really has a good understanding of how to measure the ROI of AI. Hence we have people burning a lot of money due to FOMO and no easy way of measuring the outcome, which is usually how the foundations for good Ponzi schemes are laid. This is unlikely to end well. However, as usual, it's us, the common plebs, who will suffer regardless of outcome.

cineticdaffodil 7mo ago

[dead]

abkolan 7mo ago

A certain YC company fired a few employees for not using AI, the CEO bragged about it on X and incidentally it was a crypto company.

jfreds 7mo ago

I am seeing this at my work right now. They are about to start using token consumption as _part_ of the performance review process. Obviously this is a coarse and problematic proxy for productivity. OTOH, it’s an attempt to address a real problem. There are people who are in fact falling behind (I’m talking literally editing code in notepad), and we can either let them get PIPped eventually, or try to bring them along. There is a real “activation energy” required to learning new tools, and some people need an excuse/permission. Not saying that token count is a GOOD signal, but I haven’t heard many better ideas

1dontnkow_ 7mo ago

I was thinking about this but sometimes its hard to distinguish between what the marketing of OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies say and what actually all the companies are doing throughout the world. Any thoughts on that? For example even the layoffs, nowadays seem to be because of AI or so they said but just a year or two ago there were quite some layoffs and people said "its because of the high demand in COVID and now its over, or Ukraine or inflation" but then that ignores that exactly during that time earlier were there many layofs but it was super easy "Oh COVID and supply chain!" and earlier maybe something else. Surely there are also economic booms but when did the whole world jsut suddenly started seriously listening to public statements of companies (and that jsut a few with no real income, just money from VCs) and nobody shows us the real data of whats actually happening? E.g. the companies saying they fired 10K due to AI, how much did they actually now direct their budget to AI? How many products are actually being build? Is the productivity the same? Are the customers thinking that support is suddenly amazing or actually it has seriously dropepd in quality? Or no change at all? Is it a company like KFC, your local hardwore chain store, financial isntitutions, truck manufactures or anothet AI company with funding using another AIs company with other funding using now one more AIs company products up to the power suppliers? For me it seems that its definitely impacting things and a cool technology to be more productive (for example it helps me a lot daily but its not like my life really changed) but the other things I haven't seen yet. Another point each actual AI generated app is either something akin to a toilet game or not really working (like the C compiler). So where are the amazing enterprise complicated apps fully built via agents? In banks, in government, in apps that respect GDPR and actually are secure but proudly build only or mostly with agents? The only ones, not even secure, are other AI apps to do AI stuff but its whole value it says is to be more productive in the "real" economy but it still hasn't done it yet anywhere. People still struggle with Word or AWS infra or debugging why some specific user cant log in with their custom auth provider at some esoteric region with their laws and audits and GDPR variant. So one side says its basically a tool from God and they never have created more stuff but on the other hand the other group analyzing blood work, delivering food, writing reports, etc uses it a bit or not at all but all the 95% of problems they had are there with some new ones. Also I'm afraid most of them just write now their email better or with more volume, but no real work is getting done. So yeah maybe my confusion simply lies in that fact that I have a real job and nobody can keep up with all the slop and shit generated online anymore. I'm open to feedback or learn.

MichaelRo 7mo ago

>> It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately. Exactly this: "Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens" : https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-250k-ai-tokens-nvidia-compute-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-...