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Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them." It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities were before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer - in the past they just wanted to know the developer was working on it and didn't care so much which work was what. They'd probably be so surprised to find out that a large percentage of implementation was deriving exactly what was meant by the jira ticket or the specification or the product person's intent. Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM. But now there's this pressure to believe that the developers only do the implementation part that the LLMs do, so they can pretend there will be major efficiency improvements. And it's really hard to explain to them what it is that developers even do. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but at least where I'm working all of these matters feel much more present than they did months ago.

datakan 4mo ago
It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.
- andy99 4mo ago
  I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.
  - treis 4mo ago
    This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)
  - ravenstine 4mo ago
    > You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
  - Larrikin 4mo ago
    Can you provide concrete examples?
  - insane_dreamer 4mo ago
    that was driven by seemingly endless amounts of cheap money being thrown at whatever and whoever, which is not at all what "caring for humans and providing a good work environment" means.
- heathrow83829 4mo ago
  i think it's more about cutting costs. Usually, cutting costs when there is opportunity to do so is a lot easier than growing revenue.
- ravenstine 4mo ago
  They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making a good product at a fair price. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit. And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.
  - ryandrake 4mo ago
    These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is not a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and discarded. The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.
- tunesmith 4mo ago
  I think there's something else psychological going on. What you describe is a rational approach based off of bad values. But I think I'm also seeing something weirdly irrational. It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    They can feel the contraction coming. They don't know how bad it is going to be. They don't know if their own jobs will survive. I don't think it's irrational.
    - reverius42 4mo ago
      But how can you be so sure a contraction is coming? (And when will it come? Just the idea that there surely will be one, someday, is not scary.)
      - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        Inflation is heading up, jobs are becoming more scarce. The war in Iran is costing a lot. The federal reserve is now talking about when they are going to raise interest rates, instead of when they are going to lower them. Plus the incredibly optimistic valuations they are talking up for the big AI company IPOs. If they didn't think we were nearing the top of the bubble, they wouldn't all be planning their IPOs at the same time. It's a race to see who can cash out first before it pops. It feels similar to 2007-2008. People were talking about a bubble. But nobody wants to jump off the train too early and lose out on the big profits just before the end.
- broknbottle 4mo ago
  Jack Welch Disciples
- wyclif 4mo ago
  It's the opposite of a growth mentality But to the captains of industry, this is the growth mentality. It's growth--- but only for them, not for the hoi polloi.
FloorEgg 4mo ago
That's exactly right. I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog. The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc. At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen". Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at... ..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc) So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions. This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that. In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI. And then there is the jevons paradox consideration... It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.
crystal_revenge 4mo ago
> "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them." I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention. There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own. Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline. There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.
- r4dd 4mo ago
  These posts are so boring lmao. if you really believe this, quit the yapping and concentrate your portfolio for direct and indirect exposure to all frontier AI projects.
- adamiscool8 4mo ago
  Can you give a specific example, ideally that would not have been solved by people-hours amounting to less than the token costs?
- smallnix 4mo ago
  > I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.
  - crystal_revenge 4mo ago
    We're talking 15 minutes of work versus easily 15 days of work. I'm not sure I see the gotcha here?
- tunesmith 4mo ago
  > I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. Who cares that you've had multiple instances? Everyone has had multiple instances. The question is whether that happens in EVERY instance. Because when someone's laid off, that's what the exec believes, that the person isn't needed at all. I'm not arguing that AI won't replace jobs - it's clear that jobs are already disappearing "because of AI". I'm not even arguing that it is immoral (even though it is). I'm arguing that it is short-sighted and unwise.
chrsw 4mo ago
Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.
- fg3fg 4mo ago
  Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation. Thats all the management at firms care about. Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!
  - PearlRiver 4mo ago
    The people ponying up the cash expect a return on their investment- they are not in it for the religious experience.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
    But it's not going to happen. There may be some localised productivity gains, but in many of these businesses cracks will appear over the next 6-12 months as an all-AI pipeline becomes unfeasibly expensive and there's no corresponding earnings growth. These CEOs have no clue how their companies work. They're in the driving seat of a machine they don't understand, they've been sold corporate FSD, they've turned it on like kids playing with a shiny toy, and they're about to discover it's been oversold, underbudgeted, and doesn't work yet.
    - convolvatron 4mo ago
      decades of excess capital have raised company leaders that have bought into structural delusions like 'accounts are all the matter', or 'headcounts are all that matter', and the market has rewarded them for that. Or at least ignored failure because the supply was really quite low. Remember when we all laughed at the .com companies that were going to revolutionize pet food delivery? that never went away, we just normalized it. Very little of this has been based on cost v. revenue just forever. So it's no surprise that they are a little stunned that by following what everyone says is the future things aren't just going swimmingly. The usual reaction is to just blame your team, that's easy.
senectus1 4mo ago
>"Sure they can, we can just ask them." I'm convinced this is in large part because of the anthropomorphism of AI. AI is not people, the moment you start treating it as people you start believing and thinking of it as people and you now take the human safety check out of the loop. If you take the human out of the loop you have an unsecured weapon/dangerous object on the loose. anything from excel spreadsheets through to actual weapons. it all needs a human in the loop.
dorgo 4mo ago
>Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM why not let the LLM derive what exactly was meant by the Jira ticket? I get lazy lately and if the LLM sounds like it understands the ticket I don't question it.

datakan 4mo ago

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.

andy99 4mo ago
I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.
- treis 4mo ago
  This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded
- skydhash 4mo ago
  Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)
- ravenstine 4mo ago
  > You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
- Larrikin 4mo ago
  Can you provide concrete examples?
- insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  that was driven by seemingly endless amounts of cheap money being thrown at whatever and whoever, which is not at all what "caring for humans and providing a good work environment" means.
heathrow83829 4mo ago
i think it's more about cutting costs. Usually, cutting costs when there is opportunity to do so is a lot easier than growing revenue.
ravenstine 4mo ago
They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making a good product at a fair price. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit. And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is not a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and discarded. The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.
tunesmith 4mo ago
I think there's something else psychological going on. What you describe is a rational approach based off of bad values. But I think I'm also seeing something weirdly irrational. It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  They can feel the contraction coming. They don't know how bad it is going to be. They don't know if their own jobs will survive. I don't think it's irrational.
  - reverius42 4mo ago
    But how can you be so sure a contraction is coming? (And when will it come? Just the idea that there surely will be one, someday, is not scary.)
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      Inflation is heading up, jobs are becoming more scarce. The war in Iran is costing a lot. The federal reserve is now talking about when they are going to raise interest rates, instead of when they are going to lower them. Plus the incredibly optimistic valuations they are talking up for the big AI company IPOs. If they didn't think we were nearing the top of the bubble, they wouldn't all be planning their IPOs at the same time. It's a race to see who can cash out first before it pops. It feels similar to 2007-2008. People were talking about a bubble. But nobody wants to jump off the train too early and lose out on the big profits just before the end.
broknbottle 4mo ago
Jack Welch Disciples
wyclif 4mo ago
It's the opposite of a growth mentality But to the captains of industry, this is the growth mentality. It's growth--- but only for them, not for the hoi polloi.

FloorEgg 4mo ago

That's exactly right. I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog. The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc. At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen". Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at... ..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc) So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions. This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that. In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI. And then there is the jevons paradox consideration... It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.

crystal_revenge 4mo ago

> "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them." I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention. There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own. Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline. There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.

r4dd 4mo ago
These posts are so boring lmao. if you really believe this, quit the yapping and concentrate your portfolio for direct and indirect exposure to all frontier AI projects.
adamiscool8 4mo ago
Can you give a specific example, ideally that would not have been solved by people-hours amounting to less than the token costs?
smallnix 4mo ago
> I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.
- crystal_revenge 4mo ago
  We're talking 15 minutes of work versus easily 15 days of work. I'm not sure I see the gotcha here?
tunesmith 4mo ago
> I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. Who cares that you've had multiple instances? Everyone has had multiple instances. The question is whether that happens in EVERY instance. Because when someone's laid off, that's what the exec believes, that the person isn't needed at all. I'm not arguing that AI won't replace jobs - it's clear that jobs are already disappearing "because of AI". I'm not even arguing that it is immoral (even though it is). I'm arguing that it is short-sighted and unwise.

chrsw 4mo ago

Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.

fg3fg 4mo ago
Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation. Thats all the management at firms care about. Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!
- PearlRiver 4mo ago
  The people ponying up the cash expect a return on their investment- they are not in it for the religious experience.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
  But it's not going to happen. There may be some localised productivity gains, but in many of these businesses cracks will appear over the next 6-12 months as an all-AI pipeline becomes unfeasibly expensive and there's no corresponding earnings growth. These CEOs have no clue how their companies work. They're in the driving seat of a machine they don't understand, they've been sold corporate FSD, they've turned it on like kids playing with a shiny toy, and they're about to discover it's been oversold, underbudgeted, and doesn't work yet.
  - convolvatron 4mo ago
    decades of excess capital have raised company leaders that have bought into structural delusions like 'accounts are all the matter', or 'headcounts are all that matter', and the market has rewarded them for that. Or at least ignored failure because the supply was really quite low. Remember when we all laughed at the .com companies that were going to revolutionize pet food delivery? that never went away, we just normalized it. Very little of this has been based on cost v. revenue just forever. So it's no surprise that they are a little stunned that by following what everyone says is the future things aren't just going swimmingly. The usual reaction is to just blame your team, that's easy.

senectus1 4mo ago

>"Sure they can, we can just ask them." I'm convinced this is in large part because of the anthropomorphism of AI. AI is not people, the moment you start treating it as people you start believing and thinking of it as people and you now take the human safety check out of the loop. If you take the human out of the loop you have an unsecured weapon/dangerous object on the loose. anything from excel spreadsheets through to actual weapons. it all needs a human in the loop.

dorgo 4mo ago

>Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM why not let the LLM derive what exactly was meant by the Jira ticket? I get lazy lately and if the LLM sounds like it understands the ticket I don't question it.