It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
Sure, but not at this speed. The bots can churn out a mountain of non-sense that does not work faster than people can review it and the bots themselves will lie to you and say “it’s all implemented”.
For people who have clear ideas of what to implement but struggle to find the time, this is a big gift. You can work hand-in-hand with the bot and say “nope, not that, this” until it implements what you had in mind. For aimless corporations with “ideation” meetings who cannot stop coming up with terrible ideas that none of their customers want, it’ll hasten the process of them making their software worse over time.
That’s exactly what I’m seeing at my current company.
That’s a fair point, but it’s not an issue with AI; it’s an issue with corporate culture. Corporate culture can and does change, especially with advances in technology, but there will be a churn period where it’s chaotic and mistakes are made.
I agree with that as well. A lot of the problem with my current company comes straight from the executive leadership level. I’m afraid that the culture will only change when they change (or more likely, the company will eventually just go bust).
They bought the lie that AI will replace all of software engineering, whereas I see the picture more like this:
A CEO that thinks that they’re going to develop all of the software, even with Claude code, is nuts. They simply do not have the necessary skill set to run a software project even if 100% of the hands-on programming is done by AI. They are not going to be sitting there telling a machine to move things around on a web app. They are going to believe the bot when it says that “it is implemented”.
In this, I think we more-or-less agree; I just don’t see that as a fault with AI, nor as a reason not to continue to develop/adopt AI.
And maybe your point is what Doctorow was trying to make all along, but he pushed too far in the other direction? Even now, Code Generation is a useful tool, as long as it’s used as only a tool by someone who knows what they’re doing.
And maybe your point is what Doctorow was trying to make all along, but he pushed too far in the other direction? Even now, Code Generation is a useful tool, as long as it’s used as only a tool by someone who knows what they’re doing.
In this piece — which I read via RSS feed a number of weeks ago before it was published in this medium — he is writing about what most peoples’ experience is in a company where they have decided to “do AI”, and what most CEOs think about when they think about “doing AI”.
This usually comes in the form of a company chatbot or “agentic workflow”, and in the vast majority of cases these things are very much not helpful and can actively be annoying because attention is paid to developing these things when more practical and useful features could be developed instead (see: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/).
In other pieces, he discusses — using what I would call sort of esoteric terms that he often defines inline — people in saner places that get to choose how and why to use AI to assist with their jobs. But that’s not the majority of people’s experiences and that is certainly not what CEOs are often talking about.
I think he’s being somewhat hyperbolic in this particular piece, and maybe that’s due to the amount of “AI is changing everything” or “AI has changed everything” that is appearing in LinkedIn / X posts everywhere, when it’s difficult for most to even name a single thing that the chatbot has spit out that has improved lives, and the vendored chatbot attached to an existing piece of software (which is mostly what people end up doing when they “do AI” at a company) is completely useless.
If I take myself as an example, he’s largely right that I have to play this game with internal development teams that come up with “agentic workflows” and try to get me to use them to do my job when it’s a lot easier and better to just…use Claude code myself.
AI hasn’t “changed everything”. The only thing it’s really done so far is produce a lot of chatbots and agentic workflows that aren’t very useful. It remains to be seen if: (1) it can ever be made to work more efficiently, (2) if you can ever actually run a profitable business building or running a “neocloud”, and (3) what the broader effects on software will be from mass usage of this technology.
The early signals on all of these very real concerns (not to mention others such as environmental, cultural, and economic impact) are not very positive.
Which happened without AI, too.
Remember that AI, in whatever form or field, only has to be better than the average human in the field, to be useful to a company project.
Sure, but not at this speed. The bots can churn out a mountain of non-sense that does not work faster than people can review it and the bots themselves will lie to you and say “it’s all implemented”.
For people who have clear ideas of what to implement but struggle to find the time, this is a big gift. You can work hand-in-hand with the bot and say “nope, not that, this” until it implements what you had in mind. For aimless corporations with “ideation” meetings who cannot stop coming up with terrible ideas that none of their customers want, it’ll hasten the process of them making their software worse over time.
That’s exactly what I’m seeing at my current company.
That’s a fair point, but it’s not an issue with AI; it’s an issue with corporate culture. Corporate culture can and does change, especially with advances in technology, but there will be a churn period where it’s chaotic and mistakes are made.
I agree with that as well. A lot of the problem with my current company comes straight from the executive leadership level. I’m afraid that the culture will only change when they change (or more likely, the company will eventually just go bust).
They bought the lie that AI will replace all of software engineering, whereas I see the picture more like this:
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers
A CEO that thinks that they’re going to develop all of the software, even with Claude code, is nuts. They simply do not have the necessary skill set to run a software project even if 100% of the hands-on programming is done by AI. They are not going to be sitting there telling a machine to move things around on a web app. They are going to believe the bot when it says that “it is implemented”.
In this, I think we more-or-less agree; I just don’t see that as a fault with AI, nor as a reason not to continue to develop/adopt AI.
And maybe your point is what Doctorow was trying to make all along, but he pushed too far in the other direction? Even now, Code Generation is a useful tool, as long as it’s used as only a tool by someone who knows what they’re doing.
In this piece — which I read via RSS feed a number of weeks ago before it was published in this medium — he is writing about what most peoples’ experience is in a company where they have decided to “do AI”, and what most CEOs think about when they think about “doing AI”.
This usually comes in the form of a company chatbot or “agentic workflow”, and in the vast majority of cases these things are very much not helpful and can actively be annoying because attention is paid to developing these things when more practical and useful features could be developed instead (see: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/).
In other pieces, he discusses — using what I would call sort of esoteric terms that he often defines inline — people in saner places that get to choose how and why to use AI to assist with their jobs. But that’s not the majority of people’s experiences and that is certainly not what CEOs are often talking about.
I think he’s being somewhat hyperbolic in this particular piece, and maybe that’s due to the amount of “AI is changing everything” or “AI has changed everything” that is appearing in LinkedIn / X posts everywhere, when it’s difficult for most to even name a single thing that the chatbot has spit out that has improved lives, and the vendored chatbot attached to an existing piece of software (which is mostly what people end up doing when they “do AI” at a company) is completely useless.
If I take myself as an example, he’s largely right that I have to play this game with internal development teams that come up with “agentic workflows” and try to get me to use them to do my job when it’s a lot easier and better to just…use Claude code myself.
AI hasn’t “changed everything”. The only thing it’s really done so far is produce a lot of chatbots and agentic workflows that aren’t very useful. It remains to be seen if: (1) it can ever be made to work more efficiently, (2) if you can ever actually run a profitable business building or running a “neocloud”, and (3) what the broader effects on software will be from mass usage of this technology.
The early signals on all of these very real concerns (not to mention others such as environmental, cultural, and economic impact) are not very positive.