You have to remember that the current investment level assumes that somehow everyone is going to use the AI stuff that much. It won’t do if the only heavy usage is code generation.

“Ai” has mostly wasted my time.

Particularly other people’s use of AI has wasted my time…

Out of the few that said AI made their productivity better, most of them couldn’t code.

Note this point makes business leaders so excited. They hear “cheap labor can be productive”. Missing the point that the output is supremely dubious. They are “productive” because they don’t even know if the result is good or not, and so they can accept what is handed to them.

Currently, have a feature I thought we should have done, but management said one of the sales reps vibed up the answer, so we don’t need to do it. I used it and pointed out that the result was actually incorrect, but management thinks I’m just some luddite because they can’t understand the nature of the problems either.

One thing worse than AI PRs is AI bug reports.

One is a user that experiences a symptom that could be described in a quick copy/paste with maybe a sentence. Instead they have “AI” dig in and generate a dissertation on what it thinks is the issue and the original issue is lost in the AI diagnosis. Since the user doesn’t even have it wired up to actually test the hypothosis, it is just the AI first guess, which is frequently wrong. Wasting my time and failing to provide data.

The other is someone letting AI run over code and report “bugs” as in “it disagreed on some detail in the code, even though no person has actually experienced misbehavior, nor is the particular issue a security issue, but it might be an issue that some person one day eventually might hit”.

But I totally feel the coworker that had questionable code before that is now just utterly hopeless thanks to AI. I have nothing to do with his project but occasionally got called in to figure out and explain why his code would flip out. It hasn’t passed test in over a month as it’s now eternally buggy. Any attempt he makes to fix bugs inevitably lands with more bugs. But it’s too far now, he can’t turn back (CodeGen rewrote his codebase in a language he can’t follow, so he can’t hand edit, and he’s too afraid to roll back to when he almost understood his code). Hilarious one time within a week where he reported he could work on his project no more because he had exhausted his tokens, and without the tokens he can’t do anything anymore. Framed this as a failure of management to fund his needs adequately.

I have been shocked at just how many people, people long in the business seem to actively hate writing code. How much additional work they are willing to go through to claim victory in development through prose. Spending hours trying to get CodeGen to fix a trivial CSS issue in a web page that would have taken less than a minute if they just hit f12 and looked at the offending element. I can’t fathom how they could stand their careers for sometimes two decades before CodeGen came available if they hated it just so much.

This likely refers to the famous fictitious quote from Heny Ford that wanna-be self-important “innovators” like to trot out to show how they are smarter than the customer when they put out some unasked for bullshit.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

People like to imagine the car as some miraculous thing no one but a genius could have imagined wanting and the genius descending from on high and delivering. Truth was people could easily imagine and want it, the genius was in knowing how to make what people knew they wanted.

Instead, Henry Ford said: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”

So essentially the exact opposite of “screw the customers, we know better!”

It sounds like how students think professional sounds.

Well, also some executives that I can’t stand that, if I didn’t know better, would swear were ChatGPT for decades…

Though with the ability to not even have to think about synonyms and indirect references or foreign language or potentially if someone sent you a damn screenshot of a terminal output instead of the text…

I remember a news piece where they were interviewing someone about their renouned AI work that was not LLM related. The interviewer clearly struggled and while the person conducting himself well, you knew he had to be annoyed at having to explain his work had nothing to do with the chatbots, datacenter buildout, and related resource consumption.

I’ve had what was described above, like once every 3 to 5 years. Terrible pain lying on the floor in the middle of the night hoping for relief with each attempt. Then a generally miserable day and then all good for the next few years.

By the time I’m at the doctor, nothing is wrong, so they just kind of shrug. Best they can do is guess that either it’s some random bad luck with some food or some stress reaction (half the time it’s at a place like a hotel, and I almost never go to hotels).

Yes, technically the truth. In practice the vast vast majority of consumers bought from a business that imported the item. So it’s good to highlight people have options, but the broad point of the post stands, that the businesses have the option of pocketing the difference and most of them seem to be taking that option.

As little as possible of my work is boilerplate, but some times there will be something like “I want to take width,height, and depth as arguments from the command as variables”, and poof, all the argv tedium is done.

This is a point that really sticks with me. Using it for the sometimes spot on cakewalk segments is a fairly productive win. By the time you stubbornly insist on driving it entirely blackbox with chat and trying to get the right results without actually touching code… Well, even when it works, it’s often more work than just doing it yourself.

Someone rebased a UI I worked on in a new version of the UI framework. As a result, there was this one odd gap in the UI in one specific place. A vibe coder spent 3 hours back and forth with the AI trying to get it to correct the gap and finally submitted their merge request. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of CSS. So I declined the merge request, open the gui, looked at the gap, hit f12, adjusted a single padding statement, and it was all good. People are struggling with defining all sorts of criteria and rigging it to let it try and try and try again and hopefully laid out every contingency, every corner case, and spent hours laying the ground work and could have done similar in a more straightforward way.

You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.

The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.

A key word in that sentence is “if”, it is a rhetorical example, that’s probably pretty much correct at this point. It’s not a recommended course of action, it’s a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn’t currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.

I would argue that the CEOs aren’t on the correct track, they aren’t really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was “well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are”. My response “I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level”. The “imagine a hundred years from now” by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that’s problematic.

Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.

I think it’s a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.

All the “everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality” refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it’s trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren’t good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to “net it out” to have any hope of the point landing.

On the one hand you have the loud public outcry against AI art.

On the other hand, you have a ton of people charging ahead, particularly in commercial art. A restaurant in my area uses an AI generated illustration when they might have paid a little for an artist to make a fun illustration instead. The mandatory training at my work that used to ultimately hire random actors are now AI generated cartoons. As the parent commenter stated, random Etsy accounts using AI are now drowning out human artists. Maybe some of the big names are currently shamed away from using obvious AI, but so much of the market is not related to those.

Which of course never works

If the students are such great ninjas that they are never spotted, then how would a total device ban work?

Kids are not good at hiding what they are doing. If a student is successfully getting away with something like that, it’s because the teacher doesn’t want to deal with it, not because they hid it from the teacher. I chaparoned a field trip of high schoolers. I saw for myself how they are so bad at covering up what they think they are covering up.

The ‘teacher doesn’t care’ is of course a real problem. A fair number of teachers are perfectly happy to let them quietly stare at a phone, because any non-disruptive misbehavior is no skin off their back. More work to engage and punish them and the phone user on mute is not bothering the teacher, so teacher doesn’t care. In theory they should be looking after the best interests of all the students, but in practice they got a lot of kids to look after and if the parents aren’t doing their bit, then the teacher can only do so much to make up for it.

Been starting to see more randomly picky apps. Based on vintage and rooted device.

Uninstalled the FedEx app, since every time I tapped on a tracking number, it would divert to the app which would promptly shame me for having a rooted device and refuse to run.

So I saw that my car offered up all sorts of useful diagnostic information for self diagnosing stuff. Was very excited and went to look at it for a generic fault without having to get software to tell me what the fault is. I thought "it’s stupid it has fully functional computer display yet tells me basically “contact a dealer, but it’s safe to drive” instead of what the problem is. Then I find out that because I’m in the USA, the company keeps it to themselves…

So if they see value in treating regions differently, they will absolutely go out of their way to screw over the regions that will let them.

Heh, the dryer stopped working at home and my spouse was bracing to buy a new one. So nice to break out the multimeter, find the issue, and 10 dollar part later, good as new.

Think of all the waste avoided by repairing a tiny part in a gigantic appliance.