31 ms·

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact o

by msy 5mo ago

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

er2d 5mo ago
Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money. I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.
- dpark 5mo ago
  Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.
  - casey2 5mo ago
    More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents. Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?
    - dpark 5mo ago
      My issue was not with criticism of the money being spent or how it’s being obtained. I was specifically commenting on this statement: > “Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.” This isn’t meaningful criticism. This is a vacuous “those guys are so dumb”.
  - temp8830 5mo ago
    > Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? Oh, they were involved all right. They ran their analyses and realized that the increase in Acme Corp's share price from becoming "AI-enabled" will pay for the tokens several times over. For today. They plan to be retired before tomorrow.
    - dpark 5mo ago
      Sounds like they did train in corporate finance.
      - wjeje 5mo ago
        Sounds like you haven’t had training in corporate finance.
    - wjeje 5mo ago
      That magic trick only works for publicly traded stocks. Most firms are not a google or a Microsoft - a firms cash balance can become a strategic weapon in the right environment. So wasting money is not a great idea. Lest we forget dividends. Moreover if you have a budget set re. Spend on tokens - you have rationing. Therefore the firm should be trying to get the most out of token spend. If you are wasting tokens on stuff that doesn’t create a benefit financially for the firm then indeed it is not inline with proper corporate financial theory.
      - strange_quark 5mo ago
        No, it works for any VC-backed companies. Something like 60% of VC funding last year went to AI companies. VCs aren't going to give you a money unless you're building an agentic AI-native agent platform for agents.
        wjeje 5mo ago
        No Employees of publicly traded firms benefit from short-term gains in the stock price, assuming the stock price jump holds throughout the period of grant/vesting. People who work at VC-backed firms do not get to enjoy the same degree of liquidity, not even close. There can be some outliers but that is 0.1% of all. Can't believe simple stuff like this has to be said.
  - wjeje 5mo ago
    What a finance team allocates on spend has nothing to do with what the tokens actually get used for. Are they peeking over the shoulder of each team and individual? Of course not. It can be the case that the spend is absolutely wasteful. Numbers don’t lie.
  - hattmall 5mo ago
    There is a difference to just noticing and attributing it to and recognizing negative financial outcomes. Right now for most companies they are still adjusting to declining inflation. Their bottom lines are doing quite well because consumer price inflation is much stickier than supply inflation. We are coming off of one of the quickest and largest supply lead inflationary cycles. It may not be immediately apparent for many companies that new expenditures are a drag on profitability. The real thing to look at is whether or not the future outlook for company AI spend is heading up or down?
Jagerbizzle 5mo ago
I'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers. I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.
- casey2 5mo ago
  Such as?
  - nathancahill 5mo ago
    Creating stakeholder value
    - natpalmer1776 5mo ago
      Promoting synergy
      - paradoxyl 5mo ago
        Creating productivity gain narrtives
        scottyah 5mo ago
        Aligning stakeholders
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - DANmode 5mo ago
        Eating a bagel
  - Jagerbizzle 5mo ago
    I answered this in a different comment below, but a lot of the friction is around the amount of time it takes to test/review/submit etc, and a lot of this is centered around tooling that no one has had the time to improve, perf problems in clunky processes that have been around longer than anyone individual, and other things of this nature. Addressing these issues is now approachable and doable in one's "spare time".
kranke155 5mo ago
Without good management AI is just a new way to make terrible work in unprecedented quantities. With good management you will get great work faster. The distinguishing feature between organisations competing in the AI era is process. AI can automate a lot of the work but the human side owns process. If it’s no good everything collapses. Functional companies become hyper functional while dysfunctional companies will collapse. Bad ideas used to be warded off by workers who in some shape or form of malicious compliance just would slow down and redirect the work while advocating for better solutions. That can’t happen as much anymore as your manager or CEO can vibe code stuff and throw it down the pipeline for the workers to fix. If you have bad processes your company will die, or shrivel or stagnate at best. Companies with good process will beat you.
- briansm 5mo ago
  [flagged]
hdndjsbbs 5mo ago
My team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies. This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".
- mancerayder 5mo ago
  Unfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.
- layoric 5mo ago
  Are you concerned this will just lead to coupling everywhere like microservices tend to do?
  - hdndjsbbs 5mo ago
    Oh the "micro services" are all coupled. To test anything you have to deploy a constellation of interdependent services with redundant DBs, each generating new IDs for the same underlying resource.
- vineyardmike 5mo ago
  That's so interesting because where I work, the push was to "add one more API" to existing services, turning them into near monoliths for the sake of deployment and access. Still a mess of util and helper functions recursively calling each other, but at least it's one binary in one container.
qingcharles 5mo ago
My main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to perfectly, but are ugly as hell.
- Jach 5mo ago
  Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)
  - shimman 5mo ago
    It's almost always a CRUD app or dashboard that no one uses while being extremely overkill for their use case. edit: LOL called it, a bunch of useless garbage that no one really cares about but used to justify corporate jobs programs.
    - girvo 5mo ago
      Ah but it looks cool and I can put it on my stack ranking perf eval
    - Daishiman 5mo ago
      If it's useless that's a you problem. I've been building CRUDs that would have taken me a month to get perfectly right in the span of 4-5 days which save an enormous number of human tech support hours.
      - 5mo ago
trhway 5mo ago
>Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial. well, isn't that what AI can be used effectively for - to generate [auto]response to the AI generated content.
- duskdozer 5mo ago
  What a delightful world we're building.
  - trhway 5mo ago
    ideally we'd delegate all mindless/routine stuff to AI, and we'd dedicate ourselves to the higher creative and scientific pursuits. Somehow though i think that ideal will come with some adjustments/distortions/bugs :)
cobolcomesback 5mo ago
We’re seeing the exact same where I work. Our main Slack channels have become inundated with “new tool announcements!”, multiple per day, often solving duplicate problems or problems that don’t exist. We’ve had to stop using those channels for any real conversation because most people are muting them due to the slop noise. And what’s worse is that when someone does build a decent tool, you can’t help but be skeptical because of all the absolute slop that has come out. And everyone thinks their slop doesn’t stink, so you can’t take them at their word when they say it doesn’t. Even in this thread, how are you to know who is talking about building something useful vs something they think is useful? A lot of people that have always wanted to be developers but didn’t have the skills are now empowered to go and build… things. But AI hasn’t equipped them with the skill of understanding if it actually makes sense to build a thing, or how to maintain it, or how to evolve it, or how to integrate it with other tools. And then they get upset when you tell them their tool isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. It’s exhausting, and I think we’ve yet to see the true consequences of the slop firehose.
jeremyjh 5mo ago
I'm sorry to hear you have such poor leadership.
fc417fc802 5mo ago
Sounds like a workplace wide DDoS.
Gigachad 5mo ago
We had a coworker vibecode an internal tool, do a bunch of marketing to the company at how incredible it is. Then got hired somewhere else. I just went and deleted it because it's completely broken at every edge case and half of the happy paths too.
komali2 5mo ago
> but sure do seem to help come promo time. I personally noticed this. The speed at which development was happening at one gig I had was impossible to keep up with without agentic development, and serious review wasn't really possibile because there wasn't really even time to learn the codebase. Had a huge stack of rules and MCPs to leverage that kinda kept things on the rails and apps were coming out but like, for why? It was like we were all just abandoning the idea of good code and caring about the user and just trying to close tickets and keep management/the client happy, I'm not sure if anyone anywhere on the line was measuring real world outcomes. Apparently the client was thrilled. It felt like... You know that story where two economists pass each other fifty bucks back and forth and in doing so skyrocket the local GDP? Felt like that.
_zoltan_ 5mo ago
That's not on Claude, that's on the authors. Claude is a tool. It can be abused, or used in a sloppy way. But it can also be used rigorously. I've been beating my team to be more papercut-free in the tooling they develop and it's been rough mostly because of the velocity. But overall it's a huge net positive.

by msy 5mo ago

er2d 5mo ago

Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money. I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.

dpark 5mo ago
Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.
- casey2 5mo ago
  More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents. Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?
  - dpark 5mo ago
    My issue was not with criticism of the money being spent or how it’s being obtained. I was specifically commenting on this statement: > “Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.” This isn’t meaningful criticism. This is a vacuous “those guys are so dumb”.
- temp8830 5mo ago
  > Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? Oh, they were involved all right. They ran their analyses and realized that the increase in Acme Corp's share price from becoming "AI-enabled" will pay for the tokens several times over. For today. They plan to be retired before tomorrow.
  - dpark 5mo ago
    Sounds like they did train in corporate finance.
    - wjeje 5mo ago
      Sounds like you haven’t had training in corporate finance.
  - wjeje 5mo ago
    That magic trick only works for publicly traded stocks. Most firms are not a google or a Microsoft - a firms cash balance can become a strategic weapon in the right environment. So wasting money is not a great idea. Lest we forget dividends. Moreover if you have a budget set re. Spend on tokens - you have rationing. Therefore the firm should be trying to get the most out of token spend. If you are wasting tokens on stuff that doesn’t create a benefit financially for the firm then indeed it is not inline with proper corporate financial theory.
    - strange_quark 5mo ago
      No, it works for any VC-backed companies. Something like 60% of VC funding last year went to AI companies. VCs aren't going to give you a money unless you're building an agentic AI-native agent platform for agents.
      - wjeje 5mo ago
        No Employees of publicly traded firms benefit from short-term gains in the stock price, assuming the stock price jump holds throughout the period of grant/vesting. People who work at VC-backed firms do not get to enjoy the same degree of liquidity, not even close. There can be some outliers but that is 0.1% of all. Can't believe simple stuff like this has to be said.
- wjeje 5mo ago
  What a finance team allocates on spend has nothing to do with what the tokens actually get used for. Are they peeking over the shoulder of each team and individual? Of course not. It can be the case that the spend is absolutely wasteful. Numbers don’t lie.
- hattmall 5mo ago
  There is a difference to just noticing and attributing it to and recognizing negative financial outcomes. Right now for most companies they are still adjusting to declining inflation. Their bottom lines are doing quite well because consumer price inflation is much stickier than supply inflation. We are coming off of one of the quickest and largest supply lead inflationary cycles. It may not be immediately apparent for many companies that new expenditures are a drag on profitability. The real thing to look at is whether or not the future outlook for company AI spend is heading up or down?

Jagerbizzle 5mo ago

I'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers. I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.

casey2 5mo ago
Such as?
- nathancahill 5mo ago
  Creating stakeholder value
  - natpalmer1776 5mo ago
    Promoting synergy
    - paradoxyl 5mo ago
      Creating productivity gain narrtives
      - scottyah 5mo ago
        Aligning stakeholders
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - DANmode 5mo ago
      Eating a bagel
- Jagerbizzle 5mo ago
  I answered this in a different comment below, but a lot of the friction is around the amount of time it takes to test/review/submit etc, and a lot of this is centered around tooling that no one has had the time to improve, perf problems in clunky processes that have been around longer than anyone individual, and other things of this nature. Addressing these issues is now approachable and doable in one's "spare time".

kranke155 5mo ago

Without good management AI is just a new way to make terrible work in unprecedented quantities. With good management you will get great work faster. The distinguishing feature between organisations competing in the AI era is process. AI can automate a lot of the work but the human side owns process. If it’s no good everything collapses. Functional companies become hyper functional while dysfunctional companies will collapse. Bad ideas used to be warded off by workers who in some shape or form of malicious compliance just would slow down and redirect the work while advocating for better solutions. That can’t happen as much anymore as your manager or CEO can vibe code stuff and throw it down the pipeline for the workers to fix. If you have bad processes your company will die, or shrivel or stagnate at best. Companies with good process will beat you.

briansm 5mo ago
[flagged]

hdndjsbbs 5mo ago

My team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies. This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".

mancerayder 5mo ago
Unfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.
layoric 5mo ago
Are you concerned this will just lead to coupling everywhere like microservices tend to do?
- hdndjsbbs 5mo ago
  Oh the "micro services" are all coupled. To test anything you have to deploy a constellation of interdependent services with redundant DBs, each generating new IDs for the same underlying resource.
vineyardmike 5mo ago
That's so interesting because where I work, the push was to "add one more API" to existing services, turning them into near monoliths for the sake of deployment and access. Still a mess of util and helper functions recursively calling each other, but at least it's one binary in one container.

qingcharles 5mo ago

My main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to perfectly, but are ugly as hell.

Jach 5mo ago
Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)
- shimman 5mo ago
  It's almost always a CRUD app or dashboard that no one uses while being extremely overkill for their use case. edit: LOL called it, a bunch of useless garbage that no one really cares about but used to justify corporate jobs programs.
  - girvo 5mo ago
    Ah but it looks cool and I can put it on my stack ranking perf eval
  - Daishiman 5mo ago
    If it's useless that's a you problem. I've been building CRUDs that would have taken me a month to get perfectly right in the span of 4-5 days which save an enormous number of human tech support hours.
    - 5mo ago

trhway 5mo ago

>Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial. well, isn't that what AI can be used effectively for - to generate [auto]response to the AI generated content.

duskdozer 5mo ago
What a delightful world we're building.
- trhway 5mo ago
  ideally we'd delegate all mindless/routine stuff to AI, and we'd dedicate ourselves to the higher creative and scientific pursuits. Somehow though i think that ideal will come with some adjustments/distortions/bugs :)

cobolcomesback 5mo ago

We’re seeing the exact same where I work. Our main Slack channels have become inundated with “new tool announcements!”, multiple per day, often solving duplicate problems or problems that don’t exist. We’ve had to stop using those channels for any real conversation because most people are muting them due to the slop noise. And what’s worse is that when someone does build a decent tool, you can’t help but be skeptical because of all the absolute slop that has come out. And everyone thinks their slop doesn’t stink, so you can’t take them at their word when they say it doesn’t. Even in this thread, how are you to know who is talking about building something useful vs something they think is useful? A lot of people that have always wanted to be developers but didn’t have the skills are now empowered to go and build… things. But AI hasn’t equipped them with the skill of understanding if it actually makes sense to build a thing, or how to maintain it, or how to evolve it, or how to integrate it with other tools. And then they get upset when you tell them their tool isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. It’s exhausting, and I think we’ve yet to see the true consequences of the slop firehose.

jeremyjh 5mo ago

I'm sorry to hear you have such poor leadership.

fc417fc802 5mo ago

Sounds like a workplace wide DDoS.

Gigachad 5mo ago

We had a coworker vibecode an internal tool, do a bunch of marketing to the company at how incredible it is. Then got hired somewhere else. I just went and deleted it because it's completely broken at every edge case and half of the happy paths too.

komali2 5mo ago

> but sure do seem to help come promo time. I personally noticed this. The speed at which development was happening at one gig I had was impossible to keep up with without agentic development, and serious review wasn't really possibile because there wasn't really even time to learn the codebase. Had a huge stack of rules and MCPs to leverage that kinda kept things on the rails and apps were coming out but like, for why? It was like we were all just abandoning the idea of good code and caring about the user and just trying to close tickets and keep management/the client happy, I'm not sure if anyone anywhere on the line was measuring real world outcomes. Apparently the client was thrilled. It felt like... You know that story where two economists pass each other fifty bucks back and forth and in doing so skyrocket the local GDP? Felt like that.

_zoltan_ 5mo ago

That's not on Claude, that's on the authors. Claude is a tool. It can be abused, or used in a sloppy way. But it can also be used rigorously. I've been beating my team to be more papercut-free in the tooling they develop and it's been rough mostly because of the velocity. But overall it's a huge net positive.