Comment by nsilvestri
18 hours ago
AI is accelerating my work...work which only exists because of AI.
If I had to do my individual tasks without AI, I would be slower. But if I take a step back, I'm really not changing the world any faster than I was before.
I think where LLMs truly shine is personal greenfield projects, maybe start a side project
Completely agree. LLMs are amazing for side projects.
The other place they are amazing is in working with legacy code bases. I mean, the kind the dev team always wants to throw away. First, even if you do want to throw it away, you can first find out what it does and realize it does more than you think it does. You can also create integrations to more modern components which can be used to extend it. You can also create a pretty decent test suite if you do not have one. And, once the behaviour has good test coverage, you can re-write it into something more modern. You can even completely change the architecture while ensuring compatible external behaviour. Remember, this is all in place of “throw it away and start over from scratch, only to discover that the scope is much larger than expected”.
You could already do all of that. Like, none of that is infeasible to achieve on a scale of weeks in most cases.
It’ll still take weeks with AI in the picture, but for some reason management is more willing to plan it when they also have the additional token bills to pay.
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I’m so burnt out by being swapped with so much work from AI at my day job that I don’t even want to look at anything with a screen when I’m off anymore.
I despise AI but the thought of doing something the “old way” just makes me wince at how long it would take me to do anything that would take minutes with agents that I despise.
I touch grass whenever I can now.
There's this joke like "I used to have 5 unfinished side projects, but AI changed everything. Now I have 30 unfinished side projects". And in my case it's not even a joke
Well ai made it extremely easy to finish things. Projects are usually left unfinished because the last mile is filled with boring and tedious tasks we do not like to do. AI loves those tasks. I have finished everything I bothered to, most of the time I still wrote stuff by hand, the AI just fixed tests for me (usually OS specific stuff that I can’t test locally which is a pain), told me what I was doing wrong so it was trivial for me to fix it, and checked my documentation which invariably got out of date.
I've definitely found that while "AI makes getting from 0-80 done much easier than the 80-100" holds true, it is much easier to get my work to a quality bar that I'm excited to share with my peers...
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So relatable. But I have some finished projects now and some of them I use daily.
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Can't really blame AI for that though.
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Skill issue. I had 30 unfinished side projects even before AI. Just raw talent.
No idea what you're talking about. I'm using AI to help me on my paperclip production side project, and it's going great!
Yeah, when there is no code review requirements and no pesky production database you can't just yolo :)
At work, they mostly let me increase quality, because it's easy to say find all parsers in my code base and fuzz them.
It is great. I just had claude yolo a human in the loop image segmentation pipeline last night. It cut weeks of work down to an evening like 4h. Segment Anything 3.1 + Napari final touch.
I'd also say: when you really understand a domain well and you're a one-(wo)man show, you can just fly!
Of course, you can make a giant pile of doggy-doo-doo, but that was always true, just you can now make an epic Giza-sized pile.
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> work which only exists because of AI
Could you elaborate? What work are you doing which only exists because of AI?
For all my user facing work I’m now required to do an AI summary of what I did and the impact. That summary is then graded by AI, against an AI generated rubric. For my yearly review, I use AI to summarize my summaries, and my managers AI summarizes the AI generated grades.
I’m also required to explain how I use AI in my work. I must plan all of my future work, with an AI tool. Another AI assesses whether my work is aligning with planned work.
Before I work and after I work, there is a million circular references that exist solely because of AI. These have scaled because it’s so easy to do with AI, but the we’re wasting so much time doing a ton of extra things very efficiently.
Let me do my job. My manager should know how I’m doing. Maybe highlight key wins. CSATs/etc go out every year.
Even before my last job had internally approved AI, my manager told me how he was using chatgpt on his personal computer to prepare our yearly reviews. Then when they released AI internally a few weeks later, it was still review time, and their first advertised use case was for doing your own self eval and the evals for your reports. I am willing to deal with vibed code but turning over employee evals to AI too is a sign of truly terrible management
Does any of this get read? I mean by an actual human?
This sounds truly Kafkaesque. And thank you for finally allowing me to use that word in earnest.
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So….you have outsourced multiple layers of middle-management to AI? I am not sure getting AI to write and review your TPS reports is going to move the needle.
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Its true, a part of me died when an "AI first" company after adoption of AI introduced a mandatory design report (waterfall all over again) for EACH jira ticket before starting to code
Imagine developers move faster because of AI programming! No lets create more slop for other slopmachines
It’s true, design has made a big comeback. Now we actually have time to design things carefully and try the design easily with LLM. This was just too expensive before but now the calculation changed completely. I am now using spec graphs to design systems and I have been able to create things much more advanced than I was able to before by myself. This is huge! People are still figuring this out for themselves. But now we can design things, have multiple rounds of adjustments in an afternoon, have things implemented differently and actually measure the trade offs. The final product is so much better it’s crazy. If you had an eye for design before, now this is your world. If you didn’t, yeah your will probably just bias the LLM into producing shit solutions, even if it tries to warn you about it, it still follows orders in the end.
You aren’t changing the world at all.
Then no one is by that logic.
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. -Oscar Wilde
I mean, for many years I worked on software applications for provisioning and controlling cloud orchestration platforms that only existed... to serve software applications.
It's not that deep—there were many more verticals outside of control plans, and there are now many more verticals outside of machine learning.
Or am I missing the point?
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