That said, if you can't figure out how to use AI in a software job you should look into it. Not using AI at this point is a lot like not using CAD as an architect.
They also use a bunch of dumb metrics like, total PRs submitted, total comments made on PRs, etc. To the point that, there are multiple heavily used internal tools to game these metrics. Eg, auto-comment LGTM on any approved PR. Thus, making the metrics even worse than they would have been prior.
AI is genuinely useful for many tasks. But 2x or greater business value from engineering orgs isn’t it. And even if it was business are terrible at measuring value added on an individual basis.
What they can measure though is token use. I’ve heard the same thing from other large companies my friends work for.
It’s bad enough that I’ve moved a significant amount of money out of US large-cap stocks.
When LLMs are capable of actually doing a good job, then it might be like that. We are not there yet, and we may never be.
No thanks I’ll just watch y’all slip down the slope.
Does CAD software regularly generate an incorrect design that results in a catastrophic failure of the building?
Heh. No need to be ashamed, I used to believe them when they lied to me like this too!
"Wow, look at how fast employee # 2 is setting money on fire! Let's promote him!"
Hell, throw a Tarot reading in the middle of the loop so the agent has non-deterministic behavior too.
https://github.com/trailofbits/skills/tree/main/plugins/let-...
Amazon management wants to play five-dimensional chess? Play Balatro instead.
However I see tons of people on LinkedIn with ways of backing up context, not wanting to lose context, etc.
This seems like another way the system is being misused. Higher context usage also uses more tokens. I suspect you get worse (and slower) output too than a dense detailed context.
a) you find a particular context that executes well and want to preserve parts of it or not have to repeat explanations
b) you want to continue a session so you don't have to rebuild the context from scratch
I think A is something where it's totally reasonable to preserve pieces as part of like a prompt library or equivalent, or directory-specific agent files, that kind of thing.
I think B is much more likely to lead to problems if you do it over a long time, but it can be pretty useful for getting the last drop of juice out of the metaphorical orange.
I think the antipattern (that I've done myself, admittedly) is swapping between different restored contexts for different tasks or roles - at that point you should be either converting it to more durable documentation if warranted, or curating it more specifically than "restore the entire context" even if it's just one-off.
Ideally that replaces the back and forth cycle of it's this, no it's that, it's that for reasons XYZ with a single ingestible blob that gets the agent up to speed.
If every exchange is treated as an independent query/response then it's much easier to see how cutting out the fluff using a combination of its summaries and your own helps stay focused.
Is that in the contract to use AI tools? If not, then what are they on about.
Very very few jobs in the US give you a contract.
It makes for pretty charts, extrapolations, and projections.
It doesn’t matter if the numbers are not particularly correct. As long as the data gathering step can be justified it’ll do. Though bonus points if making the number bigger is a good thing (v.s. tracking something like number of sev 1 issues).
It's quite possible they aren't trying to measure performance but are literally just trying to increase token consumption to feed the bubble and hype.
Plus pressure employees may find new unique use cases for AI.
It's like if your goal is inflation, you give out tons of money and as long as its spent, you achieve your goal.
People use AI differently and they can be equally productive with a variety of token usage quantities.
Also, different kinds of work are differently amenable to using AI.
Using it to grade people is, err, rather unwise.
Everyone I talk to has nowadays KPIs tied to AI usage on their performance evaluation.
It's astonishing how society forgets.
Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review.
We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing. Or is it best to stick within the allocated amount. Who knows? Management are playing games everywhere it seems.
It does not get any better than that
Jensen, Sam, Dario: https://i.imgur.com/AI7rtCY.jpeg
― Charlie Munger
People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.
Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon
"You spent $23, over the $20 food limit. Be more careful next time. You spent $600 on tokens, $200 more than the average. Congratulations!"
This measuring of tokenmaxxing as a proxy for something beneficial to the company has got to be the single dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my entire software career.
It would be like some company in the dot com era measuring employee's internet download traffic as a proxy for productivity or internet-pilledness.
Why not just reward employees based on who's submit the largest expenses claims? That might have some correlation to work too, right ?!
Hell, I'm in the bowels of Google as an IC and it's hard to understand what adjacent teams are doing. Even harder for management that never gets their hands on anything.
So while you know engineers are probably bullshitting you with fake work, you can at least turn around and tell your supervisor the numbers. It's all a game of plausible deniability.
That said, I’m kind of having a blast using CC in corporate with all the connectors available at our disposal, and I baffled how little some of my coworkers know about what’s available and what the capabilities are. So it’s clear that perhaps some encouragement is prudent for those who are slower to embrace new technologies, but I’m not sure tokencounting and tokenmaxing are the answer.
x187463•37m ago
...except each keystroke has an associated cost, the sum of which may equal or exceed my salary.
Weryj•35m ago
Analemma_•31m ago
Imustaskforhelp•21m ago
mass hysteria perhaps?
There used to be a time where people used to die from dancing too much (from my understanding in which hey I can be wrong, I usually am): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
I think that although we wish to consider ourselves as smart and really intelligent but we run on biological machines and clocks which evolutionary have not much of a difference since 1518 or even the times when we used to hunt and forage for that matter.
HPsquared•20m ago
greesil•19m ago