Technology

AI needs to be used as a tool for workers, not a replacement for workers. They will figure it out eventually.

AI now offers to post my ads for me on Kijiji. I provide pictures and it has been accurate on price, condition, category and description. I have a lot of shit to sell and was dreading it, but this use removes the biggest barrier for me getting it done.

Even helped me figure out some things I was struggling to find online for reference. Saved me at least an hour of tedium yesterday.

Excellent use case.

The biggest point is that you must be an expert in the field you are using it in. I rarely get fooled by hallucinations and stupid bugs because they are glaringly obvious to me. The best use case is having the llm write code for using a library that has poor documentation, that am going to use once, and I am too lazy to learn. These tools are scary when used by juniors, they are creating more work for everyone by using llms to code. I just imagine myself using this when I was a fresh grad, it is terrifying. It would have only been one step up from vibe coding.

This 1000x. I am a PHP developer, I found out about two months ago that the AI assistant is included in my Jetbrains subscription (All pack, it was a separate thing before). And recently found about Junie, their AI agent that has deep thinking (or whatever the hell it is called). I tried it the same day to refactor part of my test that had to migrated to stop using a deprecated function call.

To my surprise, it required only very minor changes, but what would've taken me about 3 hours was done in half an hour. What I also liked was that it actually asked if it can run a terminal command to verify thr test results and it went back and fixed a broken test or two.

Finally I have faith in AI being useful to programmers.

For a test, I took our dev exam (for potential candidates) and just sent it to see what it does just based on the document, and besides a few mistakes it even used modern tools and not some 5 year old stuff (like PSR standards) and implemented core systems by itself using well known interfaces (from said PSRs). I asked it to change Dependency Injection to use Symfony DI instead of the self-made thing, and it worked flawlessly.

Of course, the code has to be reviewed or heavily specified to make sure it does what it is told to, but all in all it doesn't look like just a gimmick anymore.

It's true, although the smart companies aren't laying off workers in the first place, because they're treating AI as a tool to enhance their productivity rather than a tool to replace them.

jobs are for suckers, be a consultant and charge triple

We've hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work... the results are marginally better than either approach independently.

Retired dev here, I'm curious about the nature of "the mess". Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like "vibe coding". If you're using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don't see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.

Jup. But the same goes for developers that go way too fast when setting up a project or library. 2-3 months in and everything is a mess. Weird function names, all one letter vars, no inversion of control, hardcoded things etc. Good luck fixing it.

Jean-Baptiste

Emmanuel

Zorg

I worked in one of these companies. Within months, we went from a company I would be proud to recommend to friends to a service I would never use myself, just due to the horrendous route they took to hire overseas support.

The line of tech work I was in required about a month of training after passing the interview process, and even then you had to take a test at the end to prove you’d absorbed the material before you ever speak to a customer.

When they outsourced, they just bought a company of like 30 people in an adjacent industry and gave them a week of training. Our call queues were never worse and every customer was angry with everyone by the time they talked to someone who had training.

I don’t blame the overseas agents. I blame all the companies that treat them like cattle.

Or more generalized: management going all-in with their decisions, forgetting there is a sweet spot for everything, and then backtracking losing employee time and company money. Sometimes these cause huge backlash, like Wells Fargo pushy sales practices, or great loses, like Meta with Metaverse

You know they’re just going to get bonuses and promotions.

Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.

He'll make all the stupid decisions. But they're only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.

From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say "See how that company is failing without me? That's because I bring value to the brand."

So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.

These actions aren't stupid. They're plotted corruption for the benefit of one.