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Comment by Jagerbizzle

17 hours ago

I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well.

I presume I'm not the only one.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.

Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

  • Without good management AI is just a new way to make terrible work in unprecedented quantities.

    With good management you will get great work faster.

    The distinguishing feature between organisations competing in the AI era is process. AI can automate a lot of the work but the human side owns process. If it’s no good everything collapses. Functional companies become hyper functional while dysfunctional companies will collapse.

    Bad ideas used to be warded off by workers who in some shape or form of malicious compliance just would slow down and redirect the work while advocating for better solutions.

    That can’t happen as much anymore as your manager or CEO can vibe code stuff and throw it down the pipeline for the workers to fix.

    If you have bad processes your company will die, or shrivel or stagnate at best. Companies with good process will beat you.

  • We had a coworker vibecode an internal tool, do a bunch of marketing to the company at how incredible it is. Then got hired somewhere else.

    I just went and deleted it because it's completely broken at every edge case and half of the happy paths too.

  • My team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies.

    This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".

    • That's so interesting because where I work, the push was to "add one more API" to existing services, turning them into near monoliths for the sake of deployment and access. Still a mess of util and helper functions recursively calling each other, but at least it's one binary in one container.

    • Unfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.

    • Are you concerned this will just lead to coupling everywhere like microservices tend to do?

  • My main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to perfectly, but are ugly as hell.

    • Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)

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  • We’re seeing the exact same where I work. Our main Slack channels have become inundated with “new tool announcements!”, multiple per day, often solving duplicate problems or problems that don’t exist. We’ve had to stop using those channels for any real conversation because most people are muting them due to the slop noise.

    And what’s worse is that when someone does build a decent tool, you can’t help but be skeptical because of all the absolute slop that has come out. And everyone thinks their slop doesn’t stink, so you can’t take them at their word when they say it doesn’t. Even in this thread, how are you to know who is talking about building something useful vs something they think is useful?

    A lot of people that have always wanted to be developers but didn’t have the skills are now empowered to go and build… things. But AI hasn’t equipped them with the skill of understanding if it actually makes sense to build a thing, or how to maintain it, or how to evolve it, or how to integrate it with other tools. And then they get upset when you tell them their tool isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. It’s exhausting, and I think we’ve yet to see the true consequences of the slop firehose.

  • > but sure do seem to help come promo time.

    I personally noticed this. The speed at which development was happening at one gig I had was impossible to keep up with without agentic development, and serious review wasn't really possibile because there wasn't really even time to learn the codebase. Had a huge stack of rules and MCPs to leverage that kinda kept things on the rails and apps were coming out but like, for why? It was like we were all just abandoning the idea of good code and caring about the user and just trying to close tickets and keep management/the client happy, I'm not sure if anyone anywhere on the line was measuring real world outcomes. Apparently the client was thrilled.

    It felt like... You know that story where two economists pass each other fifty bucks back and forth and in doing so skyrocket the local GDP? Felt like that.

  • That's not on Claude, that's on the authors.

    Claude is a tool. It can be abused, or used in a sloppy way. But it can also be used rigorously.

    I've been beating my team to be more papercut-free in the tooling they develop and it's been rough mostly because of the velocity.

    But overall it's a huge net positive.

  • >Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

    well, isn't that what AI can be used effectively for - to generate [auto]response to the AI generated content.

  • Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.

    I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.

    • Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved?

      You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.

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AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.

  • > Security is less or no concern

    [waits for chickens to come home to roost]

    • If security was the prime concern, there would be no chickens and no coop and no farm - people would still be living in caves. After all, outside is dangerous, and Grug Chief said, smart ass grugs with their smart ass ideas like fire or agriculture just invite complexity and create security vulnerabilities.

      After all (Grug Chief reminds us), the only truly secure computing system is an inert rock.

    • > [waits for chickens to come home to roost]

      "We are writing down X billions over 4 years, and have cancel several ambitious programs related to our AI experiments. We were following standard practice in the industry, so [shareholders] can't blame us for these chickens coming to roost. If everyone is guilty, is anyone really guilty?"

    • Doesn't take long until someone has the bright idea to pipe customer tickets directly into the poorly written internal tool

    • No problems at all except, unauthorized access to a model they were claiming was a weapon and couldn't be released to the public and having their cli code leaked in the last two weeks. Everything's just fine

  • This comment makes me want to scream.

    • This is what happens when entire industries go all in on "Move fast and break things." Imagine what they said about software applying to everything else in the world. That's what's coming.

      > Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done

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    • This is not going away.

      Even right now the difference with working with 'AI native' developers or with regular developers is day and night.

      I certainly wouldn't want a non-clause enabled developer on my team now.

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I am, oddly, able to get really quite a lot of mileage out of $20/mo of OpenAI plan, and I have never encountered a usage limit. I have gotten warnings that I was close a couple times.

I wonder what I’m doing differently.

I did spend quite a bit of time, mostly manually, improving development processes such that the agent could effectively check its work. This made a difference between the agent mostly not working and mostly working. Maybe if I had instead spent gobs of money it would have worked output tooling improvements?

  • I wonder if you're like me? I tried out the MCPs and sub agents and rules and bells and whistles and always just came back to a plain Codex / Claude Code / Cursor Agent terminal window, where I say what I want, @ a few files, let it rip, check the diff, ask for some adjustments, then commit and start the process over after clearing context.

    Haven't found a process that beats this yet and I burn very few tokens this way.

    • I don’t really write code with it at all, and that’s why I burn so many tokens.

      I like writing code, I’m good at writing code. What I hate doing is dredging through logs, filtering out test scenarios and putting together disparate information from knowledge silos - so I have the AI doing that. It’s my research assistant.

      Effectively I’m using it like an automated search engine that indexes anything I want and refines the results by using the statistical near neighbors of how other people explained their searches.

I'd be interested to learn what kind of internal tooling are you improving ?

  • We've had a lot of complaints about our review processes, time to submit, etc, and a lot of that boils down to tools no one has time to improve.

    It's now trivial to fix these problems while still doing our day jobs -- shipping a product.

  • Personally, a static analysis PR check to catch some types of preventable runtime production errors in application code

  • I’m not them but we have vastly improved our internal pipeline monitoring/triage/root cause/etc by having a new system that basically its whole purpose is to hook into all of our other systems and consolidate it under a single view with an emphasis on shortening the amount of time it takes to triage and refine issues.

    This will have previously been too ambitious to ever scope but we’ve been able to build essentially all of it in just two months. Since it sits on top of our other systems and acts as more of a window/pass through control pane, the fact that it’s vibe coded poses little risk since we still have all the existing infrastructure under it if something goes awry.

Same and it is working really well (I say contra to most individual reporting).

  • I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.

I guess that's one way to tout a technology as revolutionary without actually needing to provide any proof of it. Just say you're using it for "internal tooling" and "unannounced projects", that way nobody can look at them and notice they're indistinguishable from the slop that clogs up Show HN nowadays.

It's better than the "here's my code, it a giant pile of spaghetti but only luddites care about code quality and maintainability anyway" method, at least.

  • I'm using it to write frontend code literally 5 times faster. What would have been a shell script is now a GUI backed by an API layer that doesn't require looking up internal documentation to know that it exists.

    I've been using it to write tools that drastically facilitate spinning up local k8s cluster with an entire suite of development services that used to take two days to set up in Docker.