Ideally I want to give my junior developer a ticket from Redmine, give it access to git and it will fix the issue. But that's not how it works today. Unless ticket is superbly described to a T what is supposed to happen and where is a problem, then AI just straight up does not work and will screw things up by hallucinating. But the debugging, description and then aiming AI what it should do takes up most of the time and firing up AI and generating solution from essentially prepared data is not saving any time.
So today I am using AI only if I will get to some close ended and easily describable problem. Otherwise I don't even bother. All that hassle is not worth it.
> If you had an employee that you could actually replace with AI you should probably not have hired them...
Seems like the first statement is the response to the second.
It’s not going to be much better. We’re entering the long tail end. It already trained on the good stuff, now it’s training on its own “AI” slop.
I can see that phrase applied to more prompt engineering stuff like agents, but even there I'm not sure it's fair, they are improving rapidly too.
Right now feels exactly like when DAW and VST were maturing 25 years ago in computer audio. A new announcement all the time.
There are still music producers but the democratization of audio production was not good for professional studios who were charging a $1000 a day for studio time before this.
Spoken like an addict. Might want to see somebody about that.
Also the core of the argument is wrong, ai is clearly displacing jobs this is happening today.
In other words, it's a political problem, not an AI problem.
h4kunamata•1d ago
Companies after companies after seeing AI as a way to replace employees and not as a tool to make our lives easier. AI will run 24/7, no sick leave, no salary, can do some tasks better than humans if you like it or not.
In IT that is already a reality with high consequences, AI deleting entire production database with no rollback.
Developers being replaced with AI, ask Google with its "over 30% of our code is AI generated" and yet, suffered a massive outage worldwide due to AI slope.
Ask Klarna, aimed to reduce operational costs by 75% with AI but got a $99M net loss instead having to hire people again. Good luck with that.
Many companies are spending a lot of money into AI tools, not all of them can afford to go back, it is all in. Other companies are seeing value with AI with others following suit. Things will get a lot worse before getting any better.
There is a bright side tho, freelancers are being hired to fix slope caused by AI tools, so some people are living their best lives.
cchance•23h ago
The other thing is and AI lovers say it and they aren't wrong, the AI we have today is the worst it will ever be again, the big issue with Klarna and the others is they jumped the gun they went from 0 to replace everyone.
The company that deleted a DB was an AI issue, but it was also a company issue... no backups? Really? No sandbox for the AI? Really?
People give companies way too much credit for making smart decisions.
Edit: I imagine a lot of coding jobs will drop and come back and eventually be a lot fewer in 2-3 more versions of claude. I imagine we'll see jobs like Tier 1 call center jobs, and answering services, and stuff like drive through attendants at restaunts go away pretty rapidly in the next 3-4 years
paulryanrogers•23h ago
Google Search was once good. Now it struggles to keep up with SEO and now AI slop.
astrange•21h ago
This isn't a real issue, there's just a large cohort of people who want to think it'll go away on its own. They like saying things like this because it's a very convenient belief for them.
suddenlybananas•21h ago
redserk•18h ago
Lots of free data was available because nobody cared or knew it was being used as training data a few years ago.
But now? Why publish a side project on GitHub if the current marketing for AI is effectively “we will use this to eliminate your job”?
I’ve noticed an increased interest in keeping side projects private in my circles.
kedean•14h ago
You've just tried to sweep away a massive concern without justifying it
astrange•6h ago
pjmlp•22h ago
Similar quality, which most business have already proven they don't actually care, as long as it is cheaper than in-house.
With AI the numbers look great on the spreadsheet, now there aren't neither in-house humans, nor contractors/consultancies to worry about, only little digital gremlins like in any automated factory line.
mavelikara•21h ago
To understand this better, people should look at their own purchasing behavior. High quality goods are always replaced by "good enough" items that are significantly cheaper. Amazon, Temu, Shien etc are all great examples of those marketplaces.
Also, programers are aware of "The Rise of Worse is Better" paper for 30+ years - the inferior but simpler solution wins, and over time the issues are fixed by lots of people putting lots of work into it.