The thing to understand is that it is not about improving developer efficiency. It is about improving corporate profits.
Because that engineer using “AI”? If they are doing work that can be reliably generated by an AI then they aren’t a particularly “valuable” coder and, most likely, have some severe title inflation. The person optimizing the DB queries? They are awesome. The person writing out utility functions or integrating a library? And, regardless, you are going to need code review that invariably boils down to a select few who actually can be trusted to think through the implications of an implementation and check that the test coverage was useful.
End result? A team of ten becomes a team of four. The workload for the team leader goes up as they have to do more code review themselves but that ain’t Management’s problem. And that team now has saved the company closer to a million a year than not. The question isn’t “Why would we use AI if it is only 0.9x as effective as a human being?” and instead “Why are we paying a human being a six figure salary when an AI is 90% as good and we pay once for the entire company?”
And if people key in on “Well how do you find the people who can be trusted to review the code or make the tickets?”: Congrats. You have thought about this more than most Managers.
My company hasn’t mandated the use of AI tools yet but it is “strongly encouraged” and we have a few evangelists who can’t stop talking about how “AI” makes them two or three times as fast and blah blah blah. And… I’ve outright side channeled some of the more early career staff that I like and explained why they need to be very careful about saying that “AI” is better at their jobs than they are.
And I personally make it very clear that these tools are pretty nice for the boiler plate code I dislike writing (mostly unit tests) but that it just isn’t at the point where it can handle the optimizations and design work that I bring to the table. Because stuff is gonna get REALLY bad REALLY fast as the recession/depression speeds up and I want to make it clear that I am more useful than a “vibe coder” who studied prompt engineering.
“Why are we paying a human being a six figure salary when an AI is 90% as good and we pay once for the entire company?”
And if it actually was 90% as good that would be a valid question, in reality however it is more like 9% as good with occasional downwards spikes towards 0.9%.
i’m willing to provide different sources and discussion if you object to that one for some reason but virtually all facets of research agree current artificial intelligence performance is nothing like what you are suggesting. what you’re claiming just isn’t true and you are spreading misinformation. it’s okay to be scared but it’s not okay to lie.
I am not scared, well, except scared that I will have to listen to AI scam BS for the next decade the same way I had to listen to blockchain/cryptocurrency scam BS for the last decade.
It is not that I haven’t tried the tools either. They just produce extremely horrible results every single time.
The thing to understand is that it is not about improving developer efficiency. It is about improving corporate profits.
Because that engineer using “AI”? If they are doing work that can be reliably generated by an AI then they aren’t a particularly “valuable” coder and, most likely, have some severe title inflation. The person optimizing the DB queries? They are awesome. The person writing out utility functions or integrating a library? And, regardless, you are going to need code review that invariably boils down to a select few who actually can be trusted to think through the implications of an implementation and check that the test coverage was useful.
End result? A team of ten becomes a team of four. The workload for the team leader goes up as they have to do more code review themselves but that ain’t Management’s problem. And that team now has saved the company closer to a million a year than not. The question isn’t “Why would we use AI if it is only 0.9x as effective as a human being?” and instead “Why are we paying a human being a six figure salary when an AI is 90% as good and we pay once for the entire company?”
And if people key in on “Well how do you find the people who can be trusted to review the code or make the tickets?”: Congrats. You have thought about this more than most Managers.
My company hasn’t mandated the use of AI tools yet but it is “strongly encouraged” and we have a few evangelists who can’t stop talking about how “AI” makes them two or three times as fast and blah blah blah. And… I’ve outright side channeled some of the more early career staff that I like and explained why they need to be very careful about saying that “AI” is better at their jobs than they are.
And I personally make it very clear that these tools are pretty nice for the boiler plate code I dislike writing (mostly unit tests) but that it just isn’t at the point where it can handle the optimizations and design work that I bring to the table. Because stuff is gonna get REALLY bad REALLY fast as the recession/depression speeds up and I want to make it clear that I am more useful than a “vibe coder” who studied prompt engineering.
And if it actually was 90% as good that would be a valid question, in reality however it is more like 9% as good with occasional downwards spikes towards 0.9%.
you work in technology, presumably. so you’re supposedly an engineer of sorts.
what kind of engineer says obviously wrong statements based on their feelings?
i’m willing to provide different sources and discussion if you object to that one for some reason but virtually all facets of research agree current artificial intelligence performance is nothing like what you are suggesting. what you’re claiming just isn’t true and you are spreading misinformation. it’s okay to be scared but it’s not okay to lie.
I am not scared, well, except scared that I will have to listen to AI scam BS for the next decade the same way I had to listen to blockchain/cryptocurrency scam BS for the last decade.
It is not that I haven’t tried the tools either. They just produce extremely horrible results every single time.