> downskill the world
replyI feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using.
He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.
> He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers
replyThis hits hard. There’s a senior engineer at my job who is known for well written proposals. Today he shared a doc that had the typical AI formatting, was hard to read, and clearly not his style.
On the other hand, if others use AI to summerize stuff, does it matter anymore?
I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.
replyMaybe organize to give these workers more equity or rev share instead of just a wage so they care more for quality results instead of the behaviors they’re evaluated on and you’ll find them more pleasant to work with.
replyWhile I strongly suspect we have similar or at least compatible sociopolitical stances I actually don't know that more equity would solve this problem. He's already very enthusiastic about serving the company to the best of his abilities. He's a very high effort guy (again, I like and even admire him). He has written long missives in the work chat about how he's now able to keep more plates spinning at a time and get more done now that he has AI. Meanwhile I would argue the overall quality of his output has slightly declined because the hard parts are in the details you spend time thinking about and now all of his time is spent overseeing agents (to the point that they read the tickets on their own).
replyMaybe he keeps more plates spinning ... in his side projects. Clearly, developers are expected to produce more results with LLMs and switch between contexts quickly. It shouldn't be surprising that everyone may be running their own thing(s) on the side now.
replyThat will only encourage this behavior
replyI'm not his boss; I'm on a different team. But we're a very small company with very good compensation and revenue share in the company.
replyThat ain't it.