Summarizer

The bash one-liner might be hyperbolic but with the advent of AI everything is artificially longer, stuffier, more complex and convoluted for no reason other than because the AI allows this increase in volume with little to no extra effort. It used to be the proverbial one-liner with zero documentation because that was the best ratio of effort to results. Now the effort is on the AI and the results look more impressive. Today that will still impress a lot of people, bosses, colleagues. Very soon everyone will see through it and anything overly stuffy will have the opposite effect of looking low-effort.

They are so far removed from the process they can claim they are any % more productive and no one is able to contradict them. Call it a ‘productivity theatre’ The economic reality check is going to be devastating. It won’t be a crash of AI as a tech, it will be a crash of every ‘AI native’ company that does not even know what is their product any more.

I've simply not seen this at all. As someone with 10 YOE who was in the job market from November to early April going for senior software engineer roles, quality and architecture seemed to be the thing every org cared about. The bar not only to secure and interview, but to get hired was unbelievably high. Some of the interviews I were getting were at AI startups and all of them were either doing architectural questions or multiple rounds of architectural, behavioural and leetcode problems. Only one of the orgs was hiring junior engineers and the director of technology mentioned to me he didn't want to as they were "incapable", but it was a quota given to him by the board. I also got told by multiple recruitment agents that I wasn't experienced enough, and some hiring managers were demanding 15 YOE for a senior role.

I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of companies just like this - crash and burn even though this tech was sold as being a universal improvement. The ones that survive will spread their knowledge about how to tame this wild horse, and ideally we'll learn a thing or two in the future. But the wave of naivety has surprised me, and I think there's an endless onrush of people that are overly excited about their new ability to vibe-code things into existence. I think we've got our own endless September event going on for the foreseeable future.

It does have real benefits, but also, of course, all of the downsides you mentioned. The best analogy is the outsourcing / offshoring fad of the last decade. Managers hated that senior developers were getting highly compensated (often higher than the management class!) and pounced on every opportunity to replace expensive people with (much!) cheaper options, quality be damned. For the few companies that paid attention to the quality, this worked out swimmingly. Apple is probably the best example, they've outsourced almost all of their manufacturing to China and other similar countries. So yes, my mental picture is that every manager is drooling right now because they think they can replace someone getting paid six figures with an AI that costs six dollars a day, if that. A virtual employee that doesn't talk back, doesn't argue, doesn't question, doesn't go off on "unproductive tangents" like refactoring (whatever that's even supposed to mean), and just pumps out code 24/7 like a good little slav... employee. The very rare smart managers out there are looking at this more like the transition that happened to architect firms when CAD became available. They used to have a dozen draftsmen for every architect . Now there are virtually none, I haven't even heard that job title being used in decades! We still have architects, and if anything, they're paid even more.

I'm wondering what this could mean to the future of software work and AI use, care to weight in? I don't have a good mental model for this period of time (I do agree with your sense of things).

you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. Adding to the grab-bag of useful flow-dysfunction concepts and metaphors: Braess's paradox. [0] Sometimes adding a new route makes congestion strictly worse ! Not (just) because of practical issues like intersections, but because it changes the core game-theory between competing drivers choosing routes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

>It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. Good riddance, the ocean floor will soon be littered with Titanics like this.

Guys just go and ride it. It's their money. They decided to do this. They think you guys are stupid. Suck. Them. Dry. Or say goodbay, which is what I did on my previous role when the BS started to get obvious. Now I do LLM-assisted coding on my own terms. I decide what to do, review output and push back agains overengineered BS. But I'm a lucky one, as far as I can see. --- NO-ONE is going to be able to understand the the amount of slop created by unchecked LLMs. The path we're going forward is very clear, given how rapidly top-tier software has been degrading when they decided to pressure devs into this stupidity.

IME it's impossible to fight this people. They have to learn through consequences. There's no other way.

During the last few months when AI usage was mandated in our team and usage exploded, our team's throughput has barely changed. Now, if this was due to people working 2 hours a day and painting, cooking and playing golf the rest of the day, this would be a great result, but I see many people work past 6pm, and yet the output is mostly the same. We are not tackling harder problems or fixing more bugs despite authoring numerous skills for AI. Eventually the reckoning is sure to come, and I think it will not be pretty.

The humankind is just ankle deep into AI yet, but there's already such a huge potential for that Butlerian jihad to become true one day.

I agree. but,In practice, the important thing is that, whatever one thinks of management, you still have to speak in terms they recognize and want to hear. The target changes, but the mechanism is similar. This is often criticized, but it is also necessary even in ordinary conversation. The core skill is the ability to guide the agenda toward the place where your own argument can matter. I do not believe that good technology necessarily succeeds. Personally, I see this through the lens of agenda-setting. Agenda-setting matters. I am usually a third party looking at organizations from the outside, but when I observe them, there are almost always factions. And inside those factions, there are people with real influence. Their long-term power often comes from setting the agenda. From that perspective, AI slop looks like a failure of agenda-setting around why the market should need it. They encourage people to exploit human desire and creative motivation. But the problem is this: the market still wants value and scarcity. From that angle, this mismatch with public expectations may be a serious problem for the AI-selling industry.

Where does it end, I don’t see people using AI less as time moves on. I’ve not seen a cohesive statement on what the world looks like when LLMs can do work perfectly (which on a long enough timeline is coming). Do Google/ Anthropic / OpenAI capture all value, do clients still want consultancies, if the client wants something that a human would use to do something does that project hold any value in an LLM dominant world, why even bother.

I believe that the assumption that customers reviewing the output artifacts is "the final boss" is wrong. If AI use spreads, customers are also likely to use AI to review the artifacts. Vision, taste and curation remains, though.

I think this is exciting. The market will do its job and crush the inefficient companies where management is unable to recognize the slop. People who produce value will produce more of it with AI, people who wasted resources will waste more of it with AI.