This is the thing that drives me absolutely nuts with how most people use LLMs at work. I'm fully capable of asking the LLM to create slop, I need others to actually check and ensure their documentation is useful and correct before communicating it with others.

I sort of know what you mean. The company I work for has been encouraging the use of AI/LLMs. But some of the company leadership has been smart about it. We recently got some AI agents to use as tools in our workflow. However, they tested the agents for a few weeks before allowing us to use them, so that they know the agents do what they're suppose to do.

I think this was the standard management reaction across all the companies that embraced AI as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ.

they cut our copilot budget to 19€ per person (you can request more. but of course it’s a hassle)

they still insist AI the future and more AI is better. they are just now shifting the blame to employees: “you need to think more about how you use it”, “you cannot just throw tokens at a problem”, etc

two months ago I got an email from a manager asking me why my AI spending was so low.

This just in, Management are complete morons. Film at 11.

IMHO, API prices are likely to drop over time as we scale up and efficiencies are found, combined with general pricing pressure from the competition... SOTA models will continue to have SOTA prices, of course, but reasonable priced distilled and open weights models are already common.

Some of this seems like wishful thinking to me.

"as we scale up" We already have large data centers, and, if anything, "scaling up" is just driving up expenses for debt and hardware. The real problem with AI, relative to the internet boom, is that the more you use it, the more expensive it is. The economies of scale to be taken advantage of are minimal.

I do think price of compute will come down, but exactly because people will be running their own open source models on their own hardware instead of Sam Altman to stack GPUs in a warehouse, but it will still be too expensive and inaccurate.

And we're still headed for a financial cliff in this scenario.

“Why would I deceive you?”

Competence would require pointing out flaws someone else is responsible for, which would certainly enganger your career eventually. So, not only is competence unnecessary in management, it is actively selected against.

The salesman took me out for a steak dinner and then a strip club! He's my friend!

At our company, 12 months ago they said everyone wasn't using enough AI. They even made a leaderboard to see who was using the most tokens in the business and encouraged more and more.

A couple of months ago, everyone's AI spend was restricted to $100/month without warning. Entire workflows broken overnight because people had built theirs around Claude skills that used stupid amounts of tokens.

Now they're starting layoffs. Go figure.

I don't know. I think Facebook took a turn when it was engineered to boost engagement. Otherwise, it's just a forum for friends to make posts. What's wrong with that, in theory?

Now let's be honest here, work slop is absolutely nothing new.
I've had coworkers who will spend countless hours on a fucking useless "walking deck" which is the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard of. Its just a slideshow full of pretty pictures that morons like but says almost nothing useful. Just departmental marketing wank.
At least slop is more democratic now, I can pull one of these turds together in 5 minutes, impress the dipshits that like pretty graphics that look good, but mean nothing.

C-Suit are herd animals. Same schools, same country clubs, same conference. They all are formed the same. And they don't take advise from people who earn a few orders of magnitude less.

They were supposed to do their IPO and have positive cash flow already. Time is running out before investors are getting antsy and there's no more money available for scaling up.

deeply antisocial

It doesn't really have to be. The problem is that the profits that comes from that machine are not spread among the working people - that would be the social way to implement it.

Remember when chatgpt first went viral and everyone said that "prompt engineer will be the new career path". So, how's that going?

Trend chasing upper class idiots

Wait, we're not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.

So next, you'll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.

They thought it was their ticket to fire everybody, and the more they made you use it the sooner they could fire you.

$200 [...] almost nothing if you compare it to a programmer’s salary

This is going to depend wildly on where in the world you are (for salaries) as well as currency conversion. My AI budget is zero since I don't care for it, but I don't think anyone on my team has that high of a monthly, let alone weekly, budget.

They're just quoting the article... Which you'd know if you bothered to read at all, or even just look at the fact that it was quoted in their comment.

It's weird - competent management wouldn't require employees to fly helicopters to work without flight training, but many managers somehow think, "Everybody use AI now," makes sense.

Fortunately, the people above them care about numbers, and these don't add up.

Soon, the guys upstairs will realise that the real savings are in replacing the middle management with agents, not replacing the workers. Fingers crossed.

Because these companies started selling at a loss from the start to get people hooked. Neither Claude nor OpenAI are turning a profit right now.

This. You'd almost think people are dumb enough to blame bad management decisions on software.

That will just become a different kind of hell

I don't doubt that for a second, my friend.

When the clock strikes 5:30 we usually tell each other to get the fuck out the office. Ensure no one ever accidentally does any unpaid overtime.

And like every company that hears about agile these days.

I tried AI-everything (apart from code review of course). But it's just too hard. Letting the AI do bigger things results in subtle, hard to find, but devastating design fails and errors. It's fractal. No matter what layer I look at, it's always sort-of working but also bugged in subtle and sometimes hard-to-fix ways.
So I don't do that. Instead I use the AI as an assistant while I still do most of the actual work. I downgraded my account too because I never reached the limits for a while.

Can't wait to see this exact headline another 50 times but none of the companies in question facing any consequences for their actions, profit driven society is so fucking stupid.

I did read the article, but missed that this was a quote. I stand corrected.

I was a PM at a major now-hyperscaler and one of the engineers on my team was pretty vocal about PM not contributing.

He ended up leaving for a team that didn't have one. A few years later I happened to be in his new building, he saw me, and came up with this huge grin on his face, "oh wow are you joining our team?"

You always hate the chick writing the specs until you don't have one any more. 😂

But you better keep that output high. In hindsight this was so obviously gonna happen

Just follow trumps stock trades. That will talk you all you need to know about where the market is headed.

Ding ding ding. It's fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation... Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.

Oh look, the thing we all knew was gonna happen is happening.

What, you don’t want to read a 10 page doc made from a 2 sentence prompt?

“Now watch this drive”

You forgot the part where they’re on the golf course and already know each other and are acting like there’d be an interview because pretending to be poor and like the world is based to any degree on merit is actually hilarious to them.

I’m in a similar situation. My workplace has been heavily pushing implanting AI tools into our daily workload, but I’ve struggled to find a more meaningful use beyond a technical search engine: eg. How can I calculate x in the most resource efficient way?

That has the exact same opt-out option as API usage. If they train on that, what makes you think they won't train on API pricing model?

You can also get plans as a company (if you want to be able to manage your employees) or you can just tell them to get whatever AI sub they want and reimburse them for it

and this is why I'm retiring in two weeks. They don't get it, they never will. my work as a contractor trying to code review their slop and telling them what they needed to change fell on deaf ears. they cut me a cheque, thanked me for my time, and it was onto the next company/startup to perform the same song and dance.

i'm done. I'm done with the tech industry. 25 years just poof, gone. I'm in my mid 40s, i'm single, i own my condo, i'm done. I'm going to sit on my ass all day, play videogames, and clear out my codeberg and delete everything. I'm not even going to work on FOSS stuff anymore, i'm not going to maintain anything, I'm not going to contribute. I'm done. I want nothing to do with this crap.

My IDE told me that there is a new version of some library which fixes security bugs. I asked the AI what will break if I update. It actually found out that the new version requires a license key which has to be updated yearly even for the free use case. So I had it refactor the single use of that library to use another library instead. I then polished the refactored code myself a bit.

When I am done with something, I ask the AI what it thinks about the changes. It then tells me where I violated the style guide and sometimes it finds silly bugs I somehow missed. In rare cases it also finds serious stuff. the code definitely never got worse by having the AI look over it. Btw, looking at it doesn't mean changing it. I had to tell it to save in its memory files that it should only change anything when explicitly asked to.

When I am not sure why something is like it is, I ask the AI. It then comes up with one or more potential explanations and often I then remember what was actually the reasoning if it's my own code or the code becomes somewhat understandable when it's written by someone else.

When some behavior looks like it should be impossible, I ask the AI how it's possible, and it usually tells me the actual reason or gets close enough to make it much easier for me to find it.

When I'm unsure how to implement something, I discuss some options with the AI. It's reasoning isn't always sound. But sometimes the internal dialog is just not enough and chatting with AI works surprisingly well for me.

Just treat it like an extremely knowledgeable college with a serious psychedelics addiction. Can't let it do stuff unattended. But when it isn't hallucinating, it is pretty capable. Also, it doesn't care how much you ask it.
In general, every easy to explain task with easy to verify results and low damage on failure can be done by AI. But it is often faster to just do something yourself than explain it to the AI and polish the result.

That's only one of many harms it does to the human experience. Look at a company like Facebook. Do you think socializing that industry and sharing the profits with the users would mitigate the harms it does to our lives? I sure don't.

You mean malicious compliance works for the mid management too? I believe it.

The consequence is that they waste money and time. Which actually matters for businesses strapped for money or time. But most of the megacorps are swimming in money and in time. They waste those all the time even without the AI because the upper management accepts kickbacks to contract with the worst (but also the bribiest) contractors. And mid management, and everyone else, put their own personal interests ahead of the company's. Now that the AI hype is here, they have a new tool to waste time and money with, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Big business is a lumbering inefficient bureaucracy by its nature.

I "retired" (fancy way of saying "was laid off") from programming seven years ago and I haven't written a line of code since. I'm happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn't be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.

man i'm like a couple years behind ya. could you tell me the ballpark of what you're retiring on so i can be envious :D