As always, I use the term “AI” loosely. I’m referring to these scary LLMs coming for our jobs.

It’s important to state that I find LLMs to be helpful in very specific use cases, but overall, this is clearly a bubble, and the promises of advance have not appeared despite hundreds of billions of VC thrown at the industry.

So as not to go full-on polemic, we’ll skip the knock-on effects in terms of power-grid and water stresses.

No, what I want to talk about is the idea of software in its current form needing to be as competent as the user.

Simply put: How many of your coworkers have been right 100% of the time over the course of your career? If N>0, say “Hi” to Jesus for me.

I started working in high school, as most of us do, and a 60% success rate was considered fine. At the professional level, I’ve seen even lower with tenure, given how much things turn to internal politics past a certain level.

So what these companies are offering is not parity with senior staff (Ph.D.-level, my ass), but rather the new blood who hasn’t had that one fuckup that doesn’t leave their mind for weeks.

That crucible is important.

These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.

We are, after all, at this point, the “good enough” country. LLM marketing is on brand.

  • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    10 hours ago

    This is exactly how most developers are being asked to use it

    [citation needed]

    At work, we get emails, demos, etc constantly about how they’re using AI to generate everything from UI designs (v0) to starter projects and how they manage these huge prompts and reference docs for their agents.

    Copilot’s line-by-line suggestions are also being pushed, but they care more about the “agentic” stuff.

    I watch coworkers regularly ask it to “add X route to the API” or “make a simple UI that calls Y API”. They are asking it to do their work.

    I have to review these PRs. They come in at an incredible rate, and almost always conflict with each other. I can’t review them fast enough to still do my work.

    Also, we get AI-generated code reviews at work. I have to talk to a chatbot to get help from HR. Some search bars have been replaced with chatbots. It’s everywhere and I’m getting sick of it.

    I just want real information from informed people. I want to review code that a human did their best to produce. I want to be able to help people improve their skills, not just their prompts.

    I’m getting to the point where I’m going to start calling people out if their chatbot/agent/LLM/whatever produces slop. I’m going to give them ownership of it. It’s their output, not the AI’s.

    Edit: I should add that it’s a big company (100k+ employees)