It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.
I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement.
It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people thought the internet was good for every use case under the sun, including shipping people a single candy bar at a loss. After the dotcom bust, a lot of that went by the wayside, but there was a tremendous economic advantage to the businesses that were more useful when available on the internet.
> update 42 if statements in 32 different files
is a silly behavior for a programmer or an AI to have to do more than twice. We have tools that very effectively remove the need for things like that: programming languages that allow modular and reusable code, good design, etc.
Even if something does look copypasted, it might actually be semantically distinct enough that if you couple them, you'll create a brittle mess.
Additionally, there's always going to be global changes (update the code style, document things, refactor into a new pattern, add new functionality to callers, etc.). The question isn't whether you use your lanuage's tools or you do it by hand, the question is whether you use an LLM or do it by hand :P
I'm not some DRY zealot, but I've been in the "this system needs really similar changes to a ton of geographically distant code for simple changes" salt mines a lot. The people who say that kind of spaghetti is unavoidable are just as wrong as the ones who say it can only be fixed with a grand rearchitecture by a rockstar.
If you spend a lot of time performing monotonic tasks, then your organisation needs to delete and refactor for a while until change in 'hot' areas of the code base are easy to make. Reaching for some code synthesis SaaS to paper it over will worsen the problem and should result in excommunication from the guild.
My current codebase is ~3 million LoC all in all (not greenfield, really old code), working on it by myself, the complexity is definitely manageable between Claude and me :)
Cursor doesn't have refactorings, so
I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.
That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)
The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.
In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.
The best analogy is the outsourcing / offshoring fad of the last decade.
Managers hated that senior developers were getting highly compensated (often higher than the management class!) and pounced on every opportunity to replace expensive people with (much!) cheaper options, quality be damned.
For the few companies that paid attention to the quality, this worked out swimmingly. Apple is probably the best example, they've outsourced almost all of their manufacturing to China and other similar countries.
So yes, my mental picture is that every manager is drooling right now because they think they can replace someone getting paid six figures with an AI that costs six dollars a day, if that. A virtual employee that doesn't talk back, doesn't argue, doesn't question, doesn't go off on "unproductive tangents" like refactoring (whatever that's even supposed to mean), and just pumps out code 24/7 like a good little slav... employee.
The very rare smart managers out there are looking at this more like the transition that happened to architect firms when CAD became available. They used to have a dozen draftsmen for every architect. Now there are virtually none, I haven't even heard that job title being used in decades! We still have architects, and if anything, they're paid even more.
An example is that instead of buying a cookie-cutter "MacMansion" like in the last century even individuals can afford a unique house designed by a professional architect. It may not be an award winning artistic design, but it won't be the same copy-paste design as every neighbour up and down the street.
I'm seeing more comments online that developers are now expected to do more in the sense that what used to be a CLI script may now be a semi-vibe-coded application with a Web UI, a dashboard, and Open Telemetry integration because... why not?
As an example, I got a bunch of boxes of random Lego for my kid and I wanted to figure out what sets the pieces came from. I got Codex to vibe-code a full SPA web UI and a matching API app that pulls Rebrickable database CSVs, parses them, puts them into SQLite, and then runs a fairly complex integer optimisation solution on top of that collected data to figure out the best match. I did that in an hour while sitting in on an online meeting!
There is no way I'd have the mental energy to do a project like that otherwise. I'm too busy with housework, actual work, etc... Maybe when I was younger I could blow a few weeks of effort on something like this, but now? No way.
That cost-benefit arithmetic has dramatically shifted thanks to AI developer agents. Suddenly, many fiddly tasks are no longer fiddly, or even trivial, so there's no excuse not to do them any more.
Going back to the architect or mechanical engineering example: Significant corrections to designs used to be expensive because all the blueprints (on paper!) had to be redrawn and distributed. Now, a change to CAD design in 3D can be converted to arbitrary 2D views, cross-sections, or whatever in seconds. The software just projects whatever view you want out of the master design file. Creating the paper blueprints similarly takes a minute or two at most on an industrial large-format printer. It just spits it out.
And they say meetings aren’t productive!
You’ve hit the real issue, IT management is D-tier and lacks self awareness. “Agile” is effed up as a rule, while also being the simplest business process ever.
That juniors and fakers are whole hog on LLMs is understandable to me. Hype, fashion, and BS are always potent. The part I still cannot understand, as an Executive in spirit: when there is a production issue, and one of these vibes monkeys you are paying has to fix it, how could you watch them copy and paste logs into a service you’re top dollar paying for, over and over, with no idea of what they’re doing, and also not be on your way to jail for highly defensible manslaughter?
We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”.
It's the mechanics that don't reference Google or the Haynes manual that are more likely to get it incorrect.
As a kicker, mechanics also have a pricing book for the task, they know how many hours a task will take on a certain car (rounded up for the most part).
This is clearly not what the post was referring to, which is instead like googling how to fix a pipe in your home when you've never done any plumbing before in your life. Can it work out? Sure, depends on the issue, can you cause your pipes to freeze, your house to flood, or sediment build up to completely block a pipe? Yes.
No, instead of google they just look it up on alldata.
Also, for sale: BMW E60/61 Bentley 2-volume set. Barely used.
When I get my car fixed, I could not care less if they googled, used a service manual, or did it by "these old 2023's always had this problem right here...". I care if it is fixed.
And as I'm currently trying to fix something on my own, for financial reasons, I assure you a mechanic with training AND google can do a better job in 1/4th the time. Because I don't have the training.
Nor do the worst people using LLMs.
Granted, the trades is a bad example because it's chock full of fakers too.
Rewrite that old crunchy system that has had 0 incidents in the last year and is also largely "done" (not a lot of new requirements coming in, pretty settled code/architecture)? It's actually one of our most stable systems. But someone who doesn't even write code here thinks the code is yucky! But that doesn't convince the engineers who are on-call for it to replace it for almost no reason. Well guess what. We can do it now, _because AI!!!_ (cue exactly what you think happens next happening next)
Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI.
Need to convince your workers to go faster, but EMs tell you you can't just crack the whip? AI mandates / token spend mandates!
Didn't like code reviews and people nitpicking your designs? Sorry, code reviews are canceled, because of AI.
Don't like meetings or working in a team? Well now everyone is a team of 1, because of AI. Better set up some "teams" full of teams of 1, call them "AI-first" teams, and wait what do you mean they're on vacation and the service is down?
Etc. And they don't even care that these things result in the exact negative outcomes that are why you didn't do them before you had the excuse. You're happy that YOUR thing finally got done despite all the whiners and detractors. And of course, it turns out that businesses can withstand an absurd amount of dysfunction without really feeling it. So it just happens. Maybe some people leave. You hire people who just left their last place for doing the thing you just did and now maybe they spend a bit of time here. And the game of musical chairs, petty monarchies, and degenerate capitalism continues a bit longer.
Big props to the people who managed to invent and sell an excuse machine though. Turns out that's what everyone actually wanted.
I think we're seeing a ton of that right now, and it's not slowing down any time soon it seems.
Adding to the grab-bag of useful flow-dysfunction concepts and metaphors: Braess's paradox. [0]
Sometimes adding a new route makes congestion strictly worse! Not (just) because of practical issues like intersections, but because it changes the core game-theory between competing drivers choosing routes.
From the article:
> because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all
The core of the problem is that AI allows engineers who were previously inexperienced or downright mediocre, pretend that they are talented, and a lot of management isn’t equipped to evaluate that. It’s like tourists looking at a grocery store in North Korea from their tour bus. It looks like a fully functioning grocery store from the outside, but it is mostly cutouts and plastic fruit.
Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict.
It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off.
The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.