Comment by ryandrake
16 days ago
For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.
I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma.
I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.
Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t.
It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
I think this may have been Dell?
Dell reveals people don't care about AI in PCs (https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows-laptops/dell-rev...)
Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.
My job is like that, although it's mostly driven by my direct boss and not the whole company, but our yearly review depends on reaching out to our vendors and seeing if an AI solution is available for their products and then doing whatever is necessary to implement it. Most of the software packages we support don't have anything where AI would improve things, but somehow we're supposed to convince the vendor that we want and need that.
>It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.
3 replies →
That’s because so much experience with ai is completely crap and useless.
The perception may be that anything AI related will be obsolete in months. So why pay to have it built into a laptop?
1 reply →
I strongly felt this way about most software I use before LLMs became a thing, and AI has ramped the problem up to 11. I wish our industry valued building useful and reliable tools half as much as chasing the latest fads and ticking boxes on a feature checklist.
This is exactly what I was thinking about my current place of employment. Wouldn't all of our time be spent better working on our main product than adding all these questionably useful AI add ons? We already have a couple AI addons we built over the years that aren't being used much.
To you – yes. But have you thought about the shareholders?