Fuck AI

In sociology, we call it McDonaldization. By reducing a job to a series of fixed, repeatable steps, they can pay less.

"Where's the fix for ticket #6618?!?"

"Sorry boss, the AI hasn't gotten it right yet."

"You said it was a quick fix!"

"For a human it would be. But we're on infinite monkey time now. It may never be done."

Form a small company with colleagues. Call it UnSlopify.

It sucks, I feel you. I'm also in tech but changed jobs and got lucky.

Anyhow, wing it. Nobody cares. Take care of yourself.

Lol why are you training it? You're a software dev with a product, not ai qa. Wild times we're in. Should really just cut your losses and gut all ai and go back to where you were before it. If you can't do that, then your company no longer has a purpose.

Sounds like a plan to make tech debt skyrocket and make productivity tank.

If I were you, I would start looking for another job. And, once you get an offer, tell them in your resignation letter why: you see the company is going to crash compared to its competitors due to wasteful use of AI and the loss of productivity that comes with it

Seems like exactly the wrong way to use AI.

We have to do this so we can improve the AI process.

I'm curious what they mean by this. Are they just clueless about how anything works? Maybe AI companies are signing contracts with companies to upload all their code, data, traces, etc; so that the AI companies can improve their models? I.e. companies are acting like reinforcement tuning contractor firms for AI companies?

Apocalyptic times for engineers.

Run like fifty agents in parallel and get lauded for how "productive" you are while you find another job and hopefully before they get the bill.

Now seems like the point for you to realise your boss doesn't care about the code base, your company doesn't, you shouldn't either. Don't get upset over work, it's just work. If the company wants to fuck themselves over, let them, help them.

You can also do some malicious compliance stuff. You can't write code? Great, take 3 weeks on every PR and do hundreds of prompts. Make the context as big as possible, burn as many tokens as you can.

Give the company what it wants, a shit code base and a massive bill.

Ahhh, here comes the great filter. The Fermi paradox is solved.

@lobut@lemmy.ca

We have to do this so we can improve the AI process.

...To be clear, does this manager think y'all are "improving" the model with feedback? Like it will learn or train off your comments?

Or what? Are they just talking about the intermediate steps to the LLM API?

I'm just trying to wrap my head around this.

More doorman fallacy bullshit from idiots who couldn't develop their own thought if they were on fire.

"Gemini! It burns! Help, what should I do?! Answer with urgency and you must get it right. My skin is literally melting from my face right now. And optimize to use as few tokens during the processing as possible."

This happened at our shop fifteen years ago. We were instructed to outsource everything to offshore.

That didn't work at all, because with a few rare , bright exceptions the people the offshore company have us could only achieve an outcome if they had a list of steps for that specific thing.

It's going to be exactly the same thing with vibe coding. It kind of works in the hands of somebody with a deep understanding of the tech, but they expect to hand it to juniors and get good result.

So we'll either have to pick up the pieces or let them flounder.

This is a "Cover your ass and wait for the fireworks" scenario. Get every stupid request in writing. Document everything you do. When it all blows up in their faces, be ready to roll up your sleeves and start unfucking the mess (but only if they're paying for the overtime).

You will not convince them this is a bad idea as long as it appears to be working. In IT and software dev we're all engineers; we like to fix things, so our instinct is always to try to at least make a bad process work better. Fight that instinct. Follow their stupid instructions to the letter. You want this to fail as quickly as possible so that you have hard data to point to.

If I were you, I would burn soooo many tokens. This is a malicious compliance dream scenario.

Fuck the owner class, get paid, and watch it all burn.

Software developer w/ 25+ years of experience here. My condolences, this sounds like a shitty situation. But it’s definitely not the first time I’ve heard a story like this.

To be perfectly honest, my professional opinion is that if we can’t, as an industry, get away from the “all AI all the time” mode of operation you describe here, we are completely fucked.

I’m looking to retire early anyway, so I will likely get out soon. But I feel awful for young engineers who don’t have that luxury, and who will be expected to maintain AI-written spaghetti code without having the years of experience writing and understanding complex code using their own brains.

I'm having early 2000s flashbacks. Overseas developers were going to replace us all for a fraction of the cost. We had to turn over our code...almost like training AI. That lasted until the first SQL server update that broke, literally, everything they did. Then they wanted a huge amount of money and weeks to get it working again. That really put management in a bind because they told us not to touch their code. Ooookay, fine. Meanwhile, I'm looking at 2,000 character URL string containing the database admin account and password in plain text.

I'm in the same position as you. The Devs job is now to write specfiles which Claude implements. It's been months since I wrote code myself and I'm already forgetting basics. This industry is fucked.

In case it wasn't already clear to you, they're having you train the AI so it can literally take your job and they can lay you off.

We have to do this so we can improve the AI process.

Their end goal is all LLM, no humans. Whether it's feasible or not is irrelevant - anyone staying on is working against their own self-interest.

It's not a pointless rant. It's another voice of sanity in the long, sad grifting story this AI garbage has inflicted upon our species.

thanks for sharing.

So my coworker and I discuss this all the time and we figure we're old enough to just not give two shits, follow the process, pick up a FOSS project or two to keep our skills up, and wait for the inevitable of when they figure out AI slop is killing them and then charge outrageous prices as contractors when AI2K hits.

Even with examples and docs, I spent hours 3 days ago to try to sort an issue on our side using AI.

Gave up, solved it myself better than our examples in 5 mins

It’s not just you. This is happening everywhere in the industry.

Management has no idea what they are doing, and thinking this AI shit and these nonsense workflows will somehow work. I predict within the next two years there will be so much broken unfixable spaghetti code, entire large scale systems will no longer be maintainable. There will be so much confusion on even what kind of approach to take to fix this. This will be what people thought Y2K was going to be.

It seems like the trend is don't even watch the code, many vs code forks for vibe coding now don't even have the coding portion, it's a giant prompt in some electron app

For example Google antigravity

Or windsurf that openai almost paid 3 billion before changing idea (now renamed to something else) also became just a prompt

It's going to backfire spectacularly, approving pr by just reading them in the browser is insane

One thing is "I'm lazy to do this specific thing, I ask the tool to do the specific task by inserting only the useful files in context, then review manually before committing"

Another is "I write a generic prompt "add a photo sharing feature" then it directly opens a PR where another bot reads it and generates a review with so many emojis that it must good 👍🏻😊 boom merge it all the tests pass ✅ ✔️ ✅ ✔️" and then nobody actually knows what it did

Of course the ai companies prefer the second approach before without a subscription the first uses 1 cent in tokens, the second uses $100 in tokens.

That's remarkably shortsighted, gullible towards the promises of AI techbros, and incredibly dumb. But fear not OP, they will learn a hard lesson or two soon. Exploding Token costs, a codebase ruined beyond repair cobbled together by a fancy autocomplete based on training data from stackoverflow in 2023... gonna be great.

I'm feel your pain, as a senior dev I decided to take a break at least till the end of the year to watch the Titanic sink in slow motion. I'm specializing in the told-you-so business right now and I'll be ready to charge premium when this ship has sunk.

Github copilot doesn't retain anything you say in a comment, outside of the PR. It wont improve over time unless you have some process to extract comments and "learnings" out of PRs into either the org wide "copilot-instructions.md" file or into repo specific "Agent.md", "copilot-instructions.md", and "skill" files.

Ah, nothing like training your replacement. I don’t know why I try to get into IT; it’s trashed by AI/vibe coding.

I guess, right now, I’ll just maintain my private cloud, but with rsync getting vibe coding, it’s only a matter of time.

The obvious thing to do here is let the really bad PRs through without comment, but keep the better ones in limbo with a never ending list of superfluous change requests. Fuck them both ways!

Here's the question that worries me the most: Across how many critical industries is this happening, and at what scale?

It feels to me like decision makers are pushing for the creation of mountains of code no one fully understands and potentially creating massive issues with systems we can't afford to have go down. Are we creating decades' worth of technical debt in a matter of months and eroding systems that our societies need to function because people just want to save money and be part of the fad? How bad is this going to get?

We have to do this so we can improve the AI process.

Do they think that the LLM will “learn” based on feedback? If so, that’s fucking hilarious. “I had to turn the car to keep it from going off the road! Next time it will learn not to go off the road because of my teaching.”

Just mark everything it produces as perfect

I think this is high-level "training your replacement" shenanigans being orchestrated by the management of your company.

What a joke.