At least in my company the CFO came back after talking with other CFOs and then used Lovable to build an app. He then mentioned to his immediate team who then picked it and started running with it. It is now one of the yearly goals. The fun part is when it came time to put money where their mouth is they say the company has no funding. So more FOMO.
FOMO, US tech monoculture, complicit tech media hyping AI, actual religious AI believers, C-suites looking for short time gains, fear of investors‘ backlash, etc
I'm not convinced that they needed to be conned. That assumes that they're normally able to correctly make this type of decision without a dedicated effort to trick them. (Not saying there wasn't any dedicated effort, just that they're capable of making decisions with similarly poor judgment on their own)
my company spends millions a year on tokens and when asked about ROI the CTO just says "LoC is up! LoC isn't a good measure of productivity but it's a measure, right? right?"
For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code. You could see it from how they would "resource" projects and write job descriptions and manage. The output of the job, to them, was code written / bugs fixed / features implemented. In organizations like this, software was a cost centre, and it was treated that way.
LLMs can write code. They're actually pretty good at it. So problem solved, right? Cost centre cost reduction. Bam!
In reality the more competent in the job were really good at understanding business problems and holding domain specific knowledge, working with the other people on the team to translate that into a problem a computer could solve, and with understanding and diagnosing what was happening in the broader system, not just in a "program."
Someone needs to write the prompts given to the LLMs and decide if what they came back with even makes any sense. Someone needs to respond to pages in the middle of the night. Someone needs to be able to look at the system and have a bigger picture understanding of how it fits with the business' needs, etc. etc. That's a software engineer.
I honestly think not enough in middle and upper management really understand what software development actually is.
> For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code.
Yeah, this is nuts because at every company I've worked at it's assumed that engineers are thinking about things like product market fit, how a feature would be sold/ the "value" of the feature itself, how we would support the feature (not just the code, but how support would manage it), etc.
I don't think people realize how much of a hand engineers have in these conversations because we don't champion that, but we think a lot about the product as a whole. Obviously we don't spend as much time thinking about how the product will be sold as a sales person will, but we absolutely think about it, in my experience.
We think a lot about the business, like a massive amount about the system as a whole across these organizational boundaries.
This comes across strongly any time you hear management talking about "fungibility of engineers". Everyone is a full stack everything engineer, and AI makes that even easier for them to trick themselves into believing.
If anything, I feel like AI has made domain expertise more important, not less, as the "confidently wrong" error case for agents has no one able to sanity check it. At least before AI a human would dip their toe in the water and usually realize that having no idea what they were doing, and not even being able to understand what the comments mean, was a sign that they need to go find someone more experienced to help.
They were conned because there’s been a massive top down propaganda campaign at the highest levels of corporate America that GAI is right around the corner.
It's almost as if success in business has nothing to do with creating actual value in our society, but instead engaging in a death cult ideology of share value maximization, and that means that reasonable people are out competed in this social system by brain dead ideologues or something.
Maybe it’s not a binary? Maybe managers should both be able to delegate AND occasionally put in the effort to learn how things are working on the ground? Otherwise after about 3 layers of hierarchy all of the signal is gone in a massive game of telephone, leaving high level executives completely clueless.
Delegation does not have to be because of a lack of knowledge. In fact, it seems like if one delegates for this reason its probably a sign of trouble to come. We delegate because of lack of time.
I guess its impossible for an executive to know ALL the details of the work they delegate, but I'd be willing to wager that executives who understand the details function better in the long run.
It certainly isn't tautological that executives be imbeciles about the businesses they run.
I have mostly enjoyed AI programming and I do like using Codex. The truth is that it sometimes makes me more way more productive, but not usually. Many days are spent writing specs and babysitting prompts and it can suck. Even expensive Codex 5.4/5.5 with high thinking writes code that is just ... lazy. It takes a lot of work to get it to write excellent code. It's definitely a full time job all by itself.
I'm not talking about rocket scientist code either - I'm talking about things using raw for( instead of range-based for, or writing code that is absolutely fucking riddled with imperative logic, hacks, and kludges, when something should clearly be data-driven. Stuff that is so bad I have to tell it to start over. It routinely designs amazing architecture and absolute shit architecture, sometimes on the same day. It's just so weirdly inconsistent. If you ask it to fix a bug then you have to double check if it used a hack and sometimes it will admit to it. Sometimes it lies.
I just do not see how AI is going to replace large numbers of seasoned engineers. That would be a disaster for companies that try it. Could it replace large numbers of juniors? Yes. And maybe I am being fantastically naive. I'm 100% willing to concede that it's possible or even likely.
Problems reported in the first 90 days of ownership. Overwhelming minor niggling complaints like a piece of trim making a noise or even just misunderstandings about systems.
American automakers love crowing about that survey because it's easy to do well on. And then the car falls to shit six months later, but hey, it held together for the first 90 days so all good.
they should try and replace some executives with AI, seems like there is way more room for improvement there.
At the very least they should be held accountable for their actions. Weird how ruining people's lives is rewarded and celebrated with bonuses.
Starting with the government.
Starting with the CEO
arguably one of the best cases for AI, it can definitely spin anything to shareholders
168 comments, submitted 16 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703968
330 comments, 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446
It’s so odd to me how companies decided what LLMs are capable of without data backing it up. Were all the execs conned or something ?
At least in my company the CFO came back after talking with other CFOs and then used Lovable to build an app. He then mentioned to his immediate team who then picked it and started running with it. It is now one of the yearly goals. The fun part is when it came time to put money where their mouth is they say the company has no funding. So more FOMO.
FOMO, US tech monoculture, complicit tech media hyping AI, actual religious AI believers, C-suites looking for short time gains, fear of investors‘ backlash, etc
Fully red pilled, I literally cannot believe the rhetoric I’ve been hearing inside major companies.
Things have moved from "no one got fired for buying IBM" to "no one got fired for buying AI".
To: everyone but leadership got fired for buying AI
I'm not convinced that they needed to be conned. That assumes that they're normally able to correctly make this type of decision without a dedicated effort to trick them. (Not saying there wasn't any dedicated effort, just that they're capable of making decisions with similarly poor judgment on their own)
there is no measurement of ROI
my company spends millions a year on tokens and when asked about ROI the CTO just says "LoC is up! LoC isn't a good measure of productivity but it's a measure, right? right?"
It could also be that business conditions provided a convenient opportunity to run some experiments.
For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code. You could see it from how they would "resource" projects and write job descriptions and manage. The output of the job, to them, was code written / bugs fixed / features implemented. In organizations like this, software was a cost centre, and it was treated that way.
LLMs can write code. They're actually pretty good at it. So problem solved, right? Cost centre cost reduction. Bam!
In reality the more competent in the job were really good at understanding business problems and holding domain specific knowledge, working with the other people on the team to translate that into a problem a computer could solve, and with understanding and diagnosing what was happening in the broader system, not just in a "program."
Someone needs to write the prompts given to the LLMs and decide if what they came back with even makes any sense. Someone needs to respond to pages in the middle of the night. Someone needs to be able to look at the system and have a bigger picture understanding of how it fits with the business' needs, etc. etc. That's a software engineer.
I honestly think not enough in middle and upper management really understand what software development actually is.
> For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code.
Yeah, this is nuts because at every company I've worked at it's assumed that engineers are thinking about things like product market fit, how a feature would be sold/ the "value" of the feature itself, how we would support the feature (not just the code, but how support would manage it), etc.
I don't think people realize how much of a hand engineers have in these conversations because we don't champion that, but we think a lot about the product as a whole. Obviously we don't spend as much time thinking about how the product will be sold as a sales person will, but we absolutely think about it, in my experience.
We think a lot about the business, like a massive amount about the system as a whole across these organizational boundaries.
This comes across strongly any time you hear management talking about "fungibility of engineers". Everyone is a full stack everything engineer, and AI makes that even easier for them to trick themselves into believing.
If anything, I feel like AI has made domain expertise more important, not less, as the "confidently wrong" error case for agents has no one able to sanity check it. At least before AI a human would dip their toe in the water and usually realize that having no idea what they were doing, and not even being able to understand what the comments mean, was a sign that they need to go find someone more experienced to help.
"everyone! emergency! we need AI yesterday! we're going to do a company wide hackathon!"
"everyone! ship ship ship! make production ready versions of what was triaged from the hackathon! nnnowwwwww"
"everyone! wow 80% correct, prompt engineer it to be stricter.... and with a bigger model! wow 98% correct! this whole division is made redundant!"
"everyone! its not 98% accurate and even if it was, thats a huge set of errors given our volume!"
"everyone! our AI bills have skyrocketed! they're charging us differently because we're an enterprise! kill the AI, kill the AI"
They were conned because there’s been a massive top down propaganda campaign at the highest levels of corporate America that GAI is right around the corner.
It's almost as if success in business has nothing to do with creating actual value in our society, but instead engaging in a death cult ideology of share value maximization, and that means that reasonable people are out competed in this social system by brain dead ideologues or something.
These execs suffer from over confidence in their own abilities.
Thats partly why they get so far.
Most executives are complete imbeciles when it comes to the actual work their organizations do.
That sounds obvious, but here's the thing: that's what a tautologically good manager does.
They delegate and hire subordinates to do a job. It is by design that the communication won't involve 100% of the work done
You hire people to do a job, not to be a remote controlled puppet
Maybe it’s not a binary? Maybe managers should both be able to delegate AND occasionally put in the effort to learn how things are working on the ground? Otherwise after about 3 layers of hierarchy all of the signal is gone in a massive game of telephone, leaving high level executives completely clueless.
Delegation does not have to be because of a lack of knowledge. In fact, it seems like if one delegates for this reason its probably a sign of trouble to come. We delegate because of lack of time.
I guess its impossible for an executive to know ALL the details of the work they delegate, but I'd be willing to wager that executives who understand the details function better in the long run.
It certainly isn't tautological that executives be imbeciles about the businesses they run.
I have mostly enjoyed AI programming and I do like using Codex. The truth is that it sometimes makes me more way more productive, but not usually. Many days are spent writing specs and babysitting prompts and it can suck. Even expensive Codex 5.4/5.5 with high thinking writes code that is just ... lazy. It takes a lot of work to get it to write excellent code. It's definitely a full time job all by itself.
I'm not talking about rocket scientist code either - I'm talking about things using raw for( instead of range-based for, or writing code that is absolutely fucking riddled with imperative logic, hacks, and kludges, when something should clearly be data-driven. Stuff that is so bad I have to tell it to start over. It routinely designs amazing architecture and absolute shit architecture, sometimes on the same day. It's just so weirdly inconsistent. If you ask it to fix a bug then you have to double check if it used a hack and sometimes it will admit to it. Sometimes it lies.
I just do not see how AI is going to replace large numbers of seasoned engineers. That would be a disaster for companies that try it. Could it replace large numbers of juniors? Yes. And maybe I am being fantastically naive. I'm 100% willing to concede that it's possible or even likely.
I hope they demanded salary of 2x or more to return
I was thinking the same. Sadly they don’t have the leverage to pull that but hope Im wrong.
Tangential, what is this "JD Power Initial Quality Survey" flaunted in this article?
Problems reported in the first 90 days of ownership. Overwhelming minor niggling complaints like a piece of trim making a noise or even just misunderstandings about systems.
American automakers love crowing about that survey because it's easy to do well on. And then the car falls to shit six months later, but hey, it held together for the first 90 days so all good.
Everyone thinks AI can do everyone else's job, but not theirs.
The only job AI's can really replace are in the C-Suite.
Not a great time to be middle manager
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446