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Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow?

• RadixIO 26d ago
  It would result in higher quality and lesser quantity which would be better for good
• pmujuzi19 27d ago
  [flagged]
• conmod278 27d ago
  In support, we chuck in the logs and get detailed analysis of possible problems and causes. AI based support request handling has been literally Godsend.
• wax66 27d ago
  Pretty much nothing. We'd remove the AI integrations, the UI elements, then back to where we were. Luckily, we have no load bearing AI. But if everyone else got to keep their AI, we'd lose customers very quickly.
  • joshuamoyers 27d ago
    so ironic to see “load bearing” in a comment about removing AI. certain phrases have been ruined by fable/opus 5 for all time.
    • anslopic 27d ago
      [flagged]
      • sixothree 27d ago
        Did you create this account simply to disparage a single company?
        • anslopic 27d ago
          [flagged]
      • CookieCrisp 27d ago
        Sure sure sure
    • sixothree 27d ago
      I had this conversation recently. Not only are search engines and comment threads getting filled with AI responses, but people are increasingly sounding like AI themselves. This makes it even harder to distinguish. Related to code quality, I've noticed developers picking up tricks from AI. Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention. If any used paths in their branches, it was almost certainly their name. Now everyone uses this convention. Though, they do use correct capitalization instead of lowercase freaking _everything_ that AI does.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 27d ago
        I think this is just a Jira/bitbucket thing. If you add a feature branch, that's how the naming convention defaults. I've been seeing it for years.
        • sixothree 27d ago
          I assumed the convention came from somewhere before AI and maybe one of the new devs brought it in from there. We also have an analyst who used em-dashes before AI ruined them, and who justifiably complains about that every so often. I'm not sure that's a trend anyone wants to pick up on. But for branches in addition to Feature/, we're seeing Hotfix/, Modernization/, you name it. If you're parking branches for a long time without completing them, I'm 100% appreciative they're categorized.
          • WorldMaker 27d ago
            The original git flow suggestion [0] was posted more than 15 years ago (date on the post is 2010). It didn't entirely invent the branch names/conventions from whole cloth, it was based on plenty of prior history in SVN spaces especially, which it picked up from CVS. (Personally, for long term parked branches I prefer `{username/dev name}/` branches because then you know who the owner is without having to look at the commit log and guess based on recent commit authors. But that's the fun thing about branching conventions, there are so many to choose from, many of which have been around forever.) [0] https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
  • sixothree 27d ago
    Pretty much same. We only use it for internal projects when coding and for research for all team members, not just developers.
  • bko 27d ago
    None of your engineers use AI to develop the product? Seems hard to believe
    • AnimalMuppet 27d ago
      I don't think that's what they said. They said they could remove AI from the workflow without much disruption.
  • mancerayder 27d ago
    >Luckily, we have no load bearing AI. Is this a subtle joke?
    • rl3 26d ago
      >Is this a subtle joke? Proper weight distribution is critical in determining where the seams are.
    • notahacker 26d ago
      You're absolutely right! Honestly? It's not just a joke, it's a smoking gun.
• vips7L 27d ago
  I’d have to stop interacting with meat proxies and wouldn’t have to read copy pasted LLM text.
  • chrisra 27d ago
    I have the same feeling but don't really know why. Why do I dislike reading LLM text so much? Weird
    • vips7L 27d ago
      IMO it’s because LLM text doesn’t really say anything. It’s 600% more text and paragraphs for things that could be said in 1 sentence.
    • glawre 27d ago
      It uses 50 words when 10 would do.
    • croon 26d ago
      I don't hate it if it's text I asked for, in which case it's also easier to glance through looking for the points relevant to the topic. I hate it if the assumption is that I'm communicating with a human, and I then get hit with a wall of text that I have to decipher the context behind. I'd rather read the prompt then.
• temp_praneshp 27d ago
  If it were just my company and not the whole industry for some newly discovered reason/vulnerability, I would quit because leadership has gone retarded.
• chuckgreenman 27d ago
  I would guess that AI has given me a 30% improvement in pace? I don't know, it would feel like riding a bike on level ground instead of downhill
• oldsklgdfth 27d ago
  I generally agree that the business does not see increased productivity and revenue from AI, if it does it is small enough to be within error. That said, if everyone (not just devs) came in and there was no AI, the org would come to a halt. AI is load-bearing in my company. Everything from dev, code reviews, planning, doc writing, ops heavily uses AI. I mean heavily, there are dev that would not know where to start triaging an alarm without the robots. Same with customer service. So much of the human capital has leaked out of peoples' brains that is fair to compare it to brain drain. Realistically, it would be painful for 1-3 months. People would go to teams with AI. A year from now, leadership is gonna have a hard time justifying keeping the lights out. It is akin to asking "what would happen if your company stopped using the internet(to look things up)".
• idopmstuff 27d ago
  One-man show here - I own a dozen small e-commerce brands. I'll assume you're just taking away AI, but not the tools I've built with AI. I've got all kinds of useful tools that do helpful things, like check to make sure Amazon hasn't lost a bunch of my inventory or suddenly deindexed my product from search. These sorts of things happen without warning from time to time and are trivially fixable if you catch them, but you have to be constantly monitoring 10 different things to catch anything that could go wrong in a timely fashion. I've similarly got an inventory/cashflow management system that's deterministic that would be fine, but some of my other tools, like one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/Whatsapp/Gmail supplier convos to keep my order status board updated, is finicky. I wouldn't be able to repair that once it broke. For some tasks, I'd have to go back to freelancers. At this point, when I take over a new brand and want to refresh images or want to A/B test new ones with an existing brand, I can do that entirely with image gen. No AI would just send me back to Upwork. For other tasks, I'd just have to do them myself. Right now when I acquire a brand, I have a Claude skill that runs through all of the Amazon search and ads reports to find the key search terms, analyzes the text of the listing and proposes updates to make sure we're hitting the ones that matter. I used to do that myself, but it takes somewhere between 2-10 hours depending how many products we're talking about. The biggest loss would be the inability to expand. I started out just buying Amazon-only brands because Amazon provides a crazy amount of infrastructure that enables me to run a lot of them by myself. My most recent acquisition came with a Shopify site that had minimal sales plus a Meta ad account the guy who sold me the brand had done a little experimentation with. A year ago, I would've just discarded those, since my time is the biggest bottleneck. It takes a lot of time to run your own site and Meta ads, so it makes more sense for me not to bother and instead just make more Amazon-only acquisitions. But now I'm having a great time really pushing Claude and ChatGPT to do most of the work. I redesigned the site more or less by just having ChatGPT do research on competitors and best practices, then having Claude run with that. That took maybe eight total hours of work. I'm spinning up an enormous amount of creative to test on Meta, and I had ChatGPT research and spec all of the kinds of landing pages that are worth trying. Claude implemented them and set up the ads using Meta's ads APIs. I got all of that done yesterday. So yeah, basically if I couldn't use AI any more, I'd get back to the original thesis of my business, which is buying small brands at reasonable prices and operating them as leanly as possible. It still works, but it'd be a lot less fun and profitable.
• anonzzzies 27d ago
  My new business would instantly die, my old business (30+ years) would barely notice; those clients ain’t going nowhere.
• gottagocode 27d ago
  Hotfixes would go down by probably 50 to 60%. On a bi-weekly release rotation it was not abnormal to see 4 to 5 hot fix versions. In the past year, however, it is not uncommon to do 15 hotfix builds per release.
• _menelaus 27d ago
  We're an app dev agency so we would inflate our costs and timelines by 5x and we'd never win another bid.
  • vdfs 26d ago
    On which platform do you submit bids?
• cactacea 27d ago
  Total collapse, idiot managers already fired everyone that knew how anything worked and now they're completely fucked. Frankly I have no idea how I've managed to hang on this long but likely to be gone myself in a few weeks as well.
  • pixel_popping 27d ago
    Just curious, chaos and morality aside, the company finances are doing better or worse?
• hobonation 27d ago
  [dead]
• jpgvm 27d ago
  We would probably be fine, but much slower. However if everyone else stopped using AI we would be broke, so please don't do that.
• xxwink 27d ago
  [dead]
• VariousPrograms 27d ago
  The effort required to do most jobs has gone down and so has the output quality. Rather than doing the same quality work with less effort, some people use LLMs to produce minimum-quality work at minimum effort. LLMs are a cool tool but we’re over-encouraging use in every domain, even tasks they’re not good at. Every tech company in the world seems to be getting rich though how can I possibly say things would be better without it?
  • gtirloni 27d ago
    Is that what's happening in _your_ company?
  • deterministic 26d ago
    > and so has the output quality Not my experience at all. The quality has gone up dramatically. Because we also use LLMs to make large scale refactorings that cleans up the code and use it to find lots of bugs that would otherwise have exploded in production at some point in time.
    • croon 26d ago
      I just used Fable to thoroughly review a PR, and it came up with 5 "Findings that block approval". I went through each one through the code path (a couple were already considered during implementation), and while all 5 were theoretically accurate, 0 of them were actually reachable. I wrote them back to Claude point by point and got this back: "I checked all five claims against the code. Your list is correct on all five. I downgrade my verdict: none of the five findings blocks approval. Details and one subtlety below." This is a usual experience with SOTA models for me and others in my team. Don't get me wrong, I use it daily; sometimes as a crutch, other times as an accelerator, mostly as a validator/peace of mind. I however don't think that neither velocity or quality is meaningfully changed. But I do spend much more time arguing with a machine.
      • pranit1 26d ago
        This!! the amount of times that has happened to me in PR. A lot of the times its my fault as I haven't given the agent all of the context ( sometimes intentionally to cross check if it would reach to the same conclusion as me without additional info) but as soon as I give it all the context it would then back track on most of the blockers.
• wolrah 27d ago
  The only thing we use large models (they are not fucking AI, never will be, and calling them that only supports the hype nonsense) for in actual production is voicing generic IVR messages and such. If we lost that we'd go back to having to record them ourselves. Whoopdeedoo. Other than that, interacting with my boss would become less stupid (or at least be his own variety of it instead of ChatGPT's variety of stupid) and nothing meaningful would change. Everyone who's saying that they wouldn't get anything done at all, you're already doomed and I can't wait to watch the collapse after this crap has ruined so much.
• dosisking 27d ago
  Code quality would definitely go up.
• chrisjj 27d ago
  There'd be a huge problem training enough replacement humans to do the work to the low standard of the retired bots. We might have to settle for a rise in the quality of work. /i
• p_l 27d ago
  Honestly? I could theoretically maintain my output, yes. Practically nope, not because I can't do the work without AI, as much as because of burnout - both from technical (Ansible, Python - neither are a thing I like using) and social (dealing with corpospeak) reasons.
• vbwml 27d ago
  Productivity would go up and most people apart from 5% addicts would rejoice.
• purple_wow 27d ago
  All our devs would lose it. They will be lost
• leros 27d ago
  Nothing in our product runs on AI but productivity would slow down for sure.
• pixel_popping 27d ago
  Personally I would be lost, because we've implemented everything around AI, more than a year ago with the assumption that models will keep getting better so the importance of building the tooling around it is capital and we've made the right choice, now close to ALL issues and features and customer requests are automatically solved. The main issue I see is that currently managing 70 repos would just be physically impossible without re-hiring people versus like now with 8 monitors in grid and averaging 32 threads (4 per monitor) and being a bot for 10 hours a day, saturating about 20 subscriptions (mix Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Xiaomi, Minimax...) in total currently using our own tools, about $100K equivalent in token a month. While I loved the era of before, I would genuinely be instantly depressed to go back to it knowing that the problematics have completely shifted, this isn't a 20% improvement or something, it's straight 10x increase (at least lately) and I'm quite conservative when I say 10x, people that have focused on their tooling and not use the general harnesses will understand what I mean. I use AI daily as well to build tools for my daughter, toddler video-games, daily books... and so-on, it would be so frustrating to lose this.
  • segfaltnh 26d ago
    I love the "IYKYK" as a kind of in joke among AI psychosis enjoyers.
• OJFord 27d ago
  'all AI', or just all LLMs/coding assistants? It would be hugely disruptive to the world if no businesses could do any machine learning any more.
• nitwit005 27d ago
  I'm fairly confident our management has managed to spend more on failed or pointless AI efforts than AI could produce in benefits. If you tell every manager they need to show some sort of success with AI, you get a lot of projects that don't make sense, which then quietly die, and the process repeats.
• Jeremy1026 27d ago
  I'd have to do more manual work, but nothing major would happen. We don't use AI in our product at all.
• al_borland 27d ago
  We’d save a lot of time not sitting on calls while managers show us the results of their brainstorming sessions with Claude. Instead we could focus on making the products better again.
  • Arya_xiaofan 27d ago
    To be fair, if the managers are hands-on, those conversations with Claude might actually be useful.
    • al_borland 27d ago
      So far, they’ve largely been a distraction. They don’t have enough domain knowledge for it to be useful, so it’s full of a bunch of stuff we don’t have and won’t buy. It also has a tendency to balloon the scope.
• deterministic 26d ago
  I would cry a lot. I love my Claude Code :) But other than that nothing really.
• SipitenoMK 26d ago
  It’s impossible now, I would need to hire more homosapiens and there is a shortage of them. I use local models, so AI is equal to human time, human brain. It’s new reality for us
• plur9 26d ago
  We'd probably do a career change, writing blogs and aspiring to become influencers on Tiktok or something. :)
• metchio 26d ago
  - Code quality would go up - Code quantity would go down - Discussions online will feel normal again - Email threads will become burdersome again
• deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
• BroCoder 26d ago
  I would stop coming up with sk many ideas that AI isn't great at helping me finish.
• DerArzt 26d ago
  Several people would have their incompetence more visible.
  • trueno 26d ago
    this and i think a lot of "leaders" would go back to being quiet. they're quite emboldened to be in everyone's business these days seems like they're smoking a ton of "you're absolutely right to challenge engineering/architect teams here..."
  • kypro 26d ago
    God yes. I'm finding there is now a 5 minute delay whenever I'm chatting with someone who doesn't know what the f** they are talking about thanks to AI. Then when you get the reply at a surface level it appears very insightful to others who don't know what the f** we're talking about either – 99% of management. But obviously it's just AI slop which sounds over confident without good reason. I'm personally trying to be more deliberate about not doing that, but I suspect the AI-induced self-confidence is actually a better way to communicate if you want people to think you're smart. There is ultimately a reason behind why LLMs get reinforced in that direction, and we all know over confident people tend to portray an unreasonable level of trust. It's annoying though because those people previously would have shut up because and moved out of the way because they wouldn't want to make themselves look like morons. Now I have to debate with them and try to explain that they don't know what they're talking about which ultimately makes me look unreasonable – especially when I refuse to communicate in a similar overly confident way back.
• mbielski 26d ago
  We'd just go back to business as usual: Slow change on a stupidly old tech stack that we keep getting blocked from actually moving away from due to higher-ups getting a bee in their bonnet about the latest great idea they have. As long as my check cashes I DGAF, but having the AI has made it nice.
• jurschreuder 26d ago
  I would instantly be bored. Why have so many people turned conservative because of AI. It's the people to lazy to use their own brain and learn a new skill that don't like AI thinking for them.
• sdevonoes 25d ago
  I think things would take longer to get done (and that’s fine for me tbh). The main usage of AI for me is to do discovery: if I am working on service A that has a dozen other services as dependencies, then I clone all the repos, point the agent at them, and start to ask questions. I double check ofc. But without the agent I would be back to manual grep code and git logs, asking around, etc… that takes longer and you may miss things
• tmpsvc2695f5 25d ago
  [dead]
• KhanBotFun 25d ago
  [flagged]
• ipaddr 25d ago
  No much added and nothing lost. Even my AI side project would fall back to software that works without AI enhancements.
• sshussain270 24d ago
  Its like the agricultural revolution, once we're in, we can't go back.
• DhruvGohil100 24d ago
  we would go back to building software which takes months and several engineers and ci/cd pipelines.
• terranivium 24d ago
  I have thought about this a lot. It might make us more considerate of what we're building, i think the speed at which we can mvp has made us less critical of what we output.
• NikhilRathourAI 24d ago
  [flagged]
• roland35 24d ago
  I feel like ai essentially reduces the effort to both produce and parse through text. Right now most of my day is spent thinking about what to build next. If ai is gone, a large chunk will go back to reading and writing code again! So pretty much the same path but much slower
• markus_zhang 24d ago
  Definitely going to impact our productivity, considering the top rank developers delivered as many as 20k loc in a day sometimes. For me it’s OK because I deliberately reduces AI usage even for boilerplate stuffs. My daily loc is around a few hundred.
• tbrntbqm 24d ago
  Today Claude's uptime was suffering, so did our work. Most of the early-stage startups rely on AI a lot, especially on coding agents.