3 ms·

While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is s

While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog. High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?

pram 27d ago
Yes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it. I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)
- polotics 27d ago
  So much of this yes, colleagues who think doing AI work is asking Claude to, as you so eloquently wrote "vomit a novel", and allow themselves to disengage their brains. The joke is at the level of developers, the constant sharpening of AI merge-requests reviewing (sometimes too much) has made the new job of AI speedriding & reviewsfighting a serious brain squeeze. The value of conscienciousness has skyrocketed, and the value of openness is still the same as it ever was.
- baal80spam 27d ago
  > Claude vomit Stealing this, will use instead of AI slop!
- treis 27d ago
  It absolutely has for me. Hours/days out of a month of smashing my head against silly bugs or SQL syntax errors have gone away. I will agree that some of the savings has been eaten up elsewhere. Lots of trivial but not wrong PR comments ther lead to churn as an example.
- Izkata 27d ago
  You may be interested in this report from earlier this year: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways And a breakdown of it that gives a bit of an alternate explanation of their numbers (and more closely matches what we're seeing IMO): https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generation leads to significant bottlenecks, burnout, increased bugs, insane code churn (rewrites), and decreased feature deployment (presumably due to dealing with the bugs and bottlenecks). And as of when this was done, increased AI did not improve the situation, it generally made it worse. The code churn stat is what bothers me the most: People keep portraying the whole "quickly rewrite/re-generate code with AI" thing as a feature, but looking at it over time, it actually means you lose your battle-tested code and no longer have a stable foundation to build on top of. That's where I think the major problems will show up as code needs to be maintained - and, seemingly, already has been.
- windward 27d ago
  >just have Claude vomit a novel into it True, that's the other side of it: my daily work has lost the fun reward loop and I'm being alienated from my colleagues. But I still have colleagues!
ngruhn 27d ago
I was also sure to be homeless by now. But despite aggressively trying to automate myself away I'm somehow more busy than ever.
- msp26 27d ago
  Relatable. Every time I finish working on something, I spot so many more new things that can be built.
  - visarga 27d ago
    And because of you we are now looking bad, so you're pressuring us with your unleashed creativity.

pram 27d ago

Yes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it. I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)

polotics 27d ago
So much of this yes, colleagues who think doing AI work is asking Claude to, as you so eloquently wrote "vomit a novel", and allow themselves to disengage their brains. The joke is at the level of developers, the constant sharpening of AI merge-requests reviewing (sometimes too much) has made the new job of AI speedriding & reviewsfighting a serious brain squeeze. The value of conscienciousness has skyrocketed, and the value of openness is still the same as it ever was.
baal80spam 27d ago
> Claude vomit Stealing this, will use instead of AI slop!
treis 27d ago
It absolutely has for me. Hours/days out of a month of smashing my head against silly bugs or SQL syntax errors have gone away. I will agree that some of the savings has been eaten up elsewhere. Lots of trivial but not wrong PR comments ther lead to churn as an example.
Izkata 27d ago
You may be interested in this report from earlier this year: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways And a breakdown of it that gives a bit of an alternate explanation of their numbers (and more closely matches what we're seeing IMO): https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generation leads to significant bottlenecks, burnout, increased bugs, insane code churn (rewrites), and decreased feature deployment (presumably due to dealing with the bugs and bottlenecks). And as of when this was done, increased AI did not improve the situation, it generally made it worse. The code churn stat is what bothers me the most: People keep portraying the whole "quickly rewrite/re-generate code with AI" thing as a feature, but looking at it over time, it actually means you lose your battle-tested code and no longer have a stable foundation to build on top of. That's where I think the major problems will show up as code needs to be maintained - and, seemingly, already has been.
windward 27d ago
>just have Claude vomit a novel into it True, that's the other side of it: my daily work has lost the fun reward loop and I'm being alienated from my colleagues. But I still have colleagues!

ngruhn 27d ago

I was also sure to be homeless by now. But despite aggressively trying to automate myself away I'm somehow more busy than ever.

msp26 27d ago
Relatable. Every time I finish working on something, I spot so many more new things that can be built.
- visarga 27d ago
  And because of you we are now looking bad, so you're pressuring us with your unleashed creativity.