The way I see it, is that it’s a great tool for people that already know their shit and don’t want to bother writing the code for it. There are some other use cases which are nice, like updating documentation or helping with pull/merge requests.
But it sure isn’t worth all the downsides we currently know of, with the way it’s being implemented.
It is perfect for producing garbage that should never have been produced in the first place. Marketing wank. Nobody cares what it says, so long as it is aesthetically pleasing to the intended audience. It’s perfect for doing shit that never needed to be done in the first place. Perfect for busywork.
It is worse than useless for any technical purpose. Verifying its output requires more effort than manually producing that output.
Yep, used it on my year-end self assessment. Told it what I would have written and it bullshitted it up to the appropriate length. I reviewed it and fixed where it invented some accomplishments out of nowhere that would have been awkward if I ever got called on it. Knowing that my performance assessment would only be glanced at and never read.
Similarly, a design document owed to management for something they have no actual interest in. No one honors the design doc, no one expects it to be informative that actually uses the tech, but non-technical management feels ‘included’. Didn’t even need to be reviewed, because all the ones it concretely matters know not to bother with it.
Stuff I always hated and was pointless, but someone wanted to check some boxes.
Though just had someone clearly just feed my email into a prompt and told the AI to use my points to agree with me, and that was annoying to see someone using AI to try to be a sycophant to me. If you are going to be a suck-up, at least suck-up in your own words. I won’t do it to something someone will read in earnest.
Sadly, at least for as long as I can tell, the horseshit is simply the language of the executives. They feel like they are being smart and insightful while saying nothing. So of course we are going to be stuck with it in any work that has room for bureaucracy to exist.
At my company we have an internal AI bot that uses Anthropic. We use it to investigate bugs by comparing code to expected behavior or finding things in data.
For example, I don’t write code. But when I need to find how data from a client is being mapped. I could either ask the engineer who’s busy with other work with my menial task, I could look though a bunch of code with bitbucket, or I could ask the bot which will give me the code and any ticket related to the code and pull requests.
When finding something in the raw data. I could take a bunch of files and text strings and pull them into excel and spend a bunch of time doing lookup, matches, and index equations in Excel. Something I did for years in the past. Or have the bot do that in 2 minutes. When I’m just trying to find and validate a few things.
The way I see it, is that it’s a great tool for people that already know their shit and don’t want to bother writing the code for it. There are some other use cases which are nice, like updating documentation or helping with pull/merge requests.
But it sure isn’t worth all the downsides we currently know of, with the way it’s being implemented.
It is perfect for producing garbage that should never have been produced in the first place. Marketing wank. Nobody cares what it says, so long as it is aesthetically pleasing to the intended audience. It’s perfect for doing shit that never needed to be done in the first place. Perfect for busywork.
It is worse than useless for any technical purpose. Verifying its output requires more effort than manually producing that output.
Yep, used it on my year-end self assessment. Told it what I would have written and it bullshitted it up to the appropriate length. I reviewed it and fixed where it invented some accomplishments out of nowhere that would have been awkward if I ever got called on it. Knowing that my performance assessment would only be glanced at and never read.
Similarly, a design document owed to management for something they have no actual interest in. No one honors the design doc, no one expects it to be informative that actually uses the tech, but non-technical management feels ‘included’. Didn’t even need to be reviewed, because all the ones it concretely matters know not to bother with it.
Stuff I always hated and was pointless, but someone wanted to check some boxes.
Though just had someone clearly just feed my email into a prompt and told the AI to use my points to agree with me, and that was annoying to see someone using AI to try to be a sycophant to me. If you are going to be a suck-up, at least suck-up in your own words. I won’t do it to something someone will read in earnest.
Exactly the kind of horseshit I’m thinking of. The demand for mindless busywork is truly amazing.
I can only hope that the next big idea in business is a widespread push to “replace” AI production with “nothing”.
Sadly, at least for as long as I can tell, the horseshit is simply the language of the executives. They feel like they are being smart and insightful while saying nothing. So of course we are going to be stuck with it in any work that has room for bureaucracy to exist.
Meh, LLMs and GenAI as tools themselves and as technologies, are not that bad. There are definitely some legitimate and extremely useful use cases.
But it should never have been released to the general public, it will bring extreme harm to the world.
At my company we have an internal AI bot that uses Anthropic. We use it to investigate bugs by comparing code to expected behavior or finding things in data.
For example, I don’t write code. But when I need to find how data from a client is being mapped. I could either ask the engineer who’s busy with other work with my menial task, I could look though a bunch of code with bitbucket, or I could ask the bot which will give me the code and any ticket related to the code and pull requests.
When finding something in the raw data. I could take a bunch of files and text strings and pull them into excel and spend a bunch of time doing lookup, matches, and index equations in Excel. Something I did for years in the past. Or have the bot do that in 2 minutes. When I’m just trying to find and validate a few things.