Summarizer

> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. I'm not sure how we can create incentives that optimize for finding the 'right' solution, which may be the cheapest (the bash one-liner). Perhaps a widely recognized but not overly optimized for benchmark for this class of problems?

> And in practice, they usually only manage people … I usually differentiate between real managers who exist to make decisions, versus those who manage people. The latter are “overseers” not managers.

In my last company, what my manager liked was an increase in AI adoption metrics, because that’s what his boss likes.

> I do get upset when people say "I'll ask claude" The dude is just acting like a manager with a technical employee (agent) who does the hands-on work. If you are upset about this you should be hopping mad about the whole manager-director-VP-SVP hierarchy above this dude.

> It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. Don't you get dinged as a slow performer? Management expects x5 speed on everything now that AI is available.

It's going to depend on the type of team and environment you work in. Probably on how senior you are as well. If your boss asks you for specific documents and expects a quick turnaround, and you regularly take 3 weeks or whatever to produce them, then yeah probably. If your boss generally leaves you alone to find and solve problems on your own, then probably not.

it actually insane that this sort of thing is tolerated. Its a culture thing and frankly just rude. My org is pretty AI-pilled and this type of behavior will just not fly. I need to be assured im talking to a human who is using their brain.

There’s people who use AI to solve problems, and then there’s people who have completely offloaded all of their thinking to LLMs. I have a manager who when asked a question won’t think even for a moment about it and will just paste paragraphs of AI generated text back.

This is happening at my place as well. I am a senior leader, but I find it hard to push back on this. I something looks plausible and everyone has reacted with a thumbs up (but probably only skimmed the document), when is the first one saying “what is this shit?” The length itself is not an indicator per se, but you can sense when it is not honest. If others do not have a sense for it, it seems like complaining about something new.

15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...

Sadly I don't think management would go and build it properly, this sort of thing happens frequently where the prototype is put directly into production because why waste time redoing something that already exists and works. Just got to clean it up a bit, round off some sharp corners, and put it into production post-haste.

What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When called out, he would result to personal attacks. After about 6 months, several people left and the ones who stayed went all in on AI. They've been building agentic workflows for the past 12 months in an effort to plug the gap from the competent members of staff leaving. The result, nothing of value has been released in the past 18 months. The business is cutting costs after wasting massive amounts on cloud compute on poorly designed solutions, making up for it by freezing hiring.

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.

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive . It’s goddamn peacock feathers. It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.

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 an LLM enjoyer who also thinks that ‘er ‘jerbs are safe and, taken to their logical conclusion, most LLM-stroking online around coding reduces to an argument that we should be speaking Haskell to LLMs and also in specs and documentation (just kidding, OCaml is prettier). But also, I do a little business. You’ve hit the real issue, IT management is D-tier and lacks self awareness. “Agile” is effed up as a rule, while also being the simplest business process ever. That juniors and fakers are whole hog on LLMs is understandable to me. Hype, fashion, and BS are always potent. The part I still cannot understand, as an Executive in spirit: when there is a production issue, and one of these vibes monkeys you are paying has to fix it, how could you watch them copy and paste logs into a service you’re top dollar paying for, over and over, with no idea of what they’re doing, and also not be on your way to jail for highly defensible manslaughter? We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”.

Honestly, the most impactful thing I've seen AI do for any workplace is serve as the ultimate excuse for whatever pet thing someone's wanted to do, that can't stand on its own merits, and what they really need is a solid excuse. Rewrite that old crunchy system that has had 0 incidents in the last year and is also largely "done" (not a lot of new requirements coming in, pretty settled code/architecture)? It's actually one of our most stable systems. But someone who doesn't even write code here thinks the code is yucky! But that doesn't convince the engineers who are on-call for it to replace it for almost no reason. Well guess what. We can do it now, _because AI!!!_ (cue exactly what you think happens next happening next) Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. Need to convince your workers to go faster, but EMs tell you you can't just crack the whip? AI mandates / token spend mandates! Didn't like code reviews and people nitpicking your designs? Sorry, code reviews are canceled, because of AI. Don't like meetings or working in a team? Well now everyone is a team of 1, because of AI. Better set up some "teams" full of teams of 1, call them "AI-first" teams, and wait what do you mean they're on vacation and the service is down? Etc. And they don't even care that these things result in the exact negative outcomes that are why you didn't do them before you had the excuse. You're happy that YOUR thing finally got done despite all the whiners and detractors. And of course, it turns out that businesses can withstand an absurd amount of dysfunction without really feeling it. So it just happens. Maybe some people leave. You hire people who just left their last place for doing the thing you just did and now maybe they spend a bit of time here. And the game of musical chairs, petty monarchies, and degenerate capitalism continues a bit longer. Big props to the people who managed to invent and sell an excuse machine though. Turns out that's what everyone actually wanted.

> Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. I think we're seeing a ton of that right now, and it's not slowing down any time soon it seems.

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. From the article: > because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all The core of the problem is that AI allows engineers who were previously inexperienced or downright mediocre, pretend that they are talented, and a lot of management isn’t equipped to evaluate that. It’s like tourists looking at a grocery store in North Korea from their tour bus. It looks like a fully functioning grocery store from the outside, but it is mostly cutouts and plastic fruit.

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict. It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off. The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.

I've personally witnessed this: 1. My own manager now gives "expert advice and suggestions" using Claude based on his/her incomplete understanding of the domain. 2. Multiple non-technical people within the company are developing internal software tools to be deployed org wide. Hoping such demos will get them their recognition and incentives that they deserve. Management as expected are impressed and approving such POCs. 3. Hyperactive colleagues showcasing expert looking demos that leadership buys. All the while has zero understanding of what's happening underneath. I didn't know how to articulate this problem well, but this article does a great job!

Same, the other day my manager sent a python script to create a jira ticket from some data to a team slack channel... as if no one else could figure that out or ask some LLM (sorry, I needed to vent)

My boss told me enforcing code quality wasn’t important because in 6 months we won’t even read code anymore.

I'm sure they're even more all-in on AI every month. "We will surely succeed if only we AI even harder!" This is how self-reinforcing delusions work. "AI will close the gap" is the fixed belief, and any evidence that comes in is interpreted such that it strengthens that belief.

Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited. Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind: - "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt" The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

Exactly what I expected to read after reading the first part of your post lol. I’m starting to realise, many people and the management themselves don’t really understand why the firm exists, and what they do. Funny to watch tbh

From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside. Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.

Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this <buzzword> ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.

Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort… Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.

The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.

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

It goes even further: The existence and availability and feature set of a technology/service is a social construct within a company. At my employer (major public company), when someone says we have X, this then politically turns into X exists, and you have to use it with the assumed feature set. Even when this feature set doesn't exist!

My line manager using a lazy single line description of a product is generating whole product listings and HTML for our web shop, never checking it. SEO is poor, views and conversion are collapsing. Upper management is responding to my serious issues with ChatGPT bullet point lists that don't address the problem. Video conferences I can see people typing into and reading back GPT instructions, suppliers are sending AI generated product images. 3rd party site devs are running buggy site deployments with Claude Code written as co author. I can't take it anymore, its an office of zombies.

It's a small family run company that turns over multi million on bespoke stone pieces. AI is rotting away at the core of the business from leadership to customer service. I was passionate before the rot, but I've got a new job starting in 5 weeks and I can't wait. Perhaps you are self projecting a little, these people got employed on good wages and have the skills the just don't use them anymore. I hate the future.

Our team is assessing some new tools and one of our VPs produced a document just like this and none of us read it because it was obvious that it was generated slop and way too long. I don't get what value such tomes are actually providing when you're comparing three SaaS tools against each other.

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.

Or maybe the AI tools don't do what the advertising says they do.

After reading this article, I can definitely feel how productivity rises inside organizations. More precisely, this feels like a person who would be loved by management. The article almost reads like a practical manual for increasing perceived productivity inside a company. The argument is repetitive: 1. AI generates convincing-looking artifacts without corresponding judgment. 2. Organizations mistake those artifacts for progress. 3. Managers mistake volume for competence. The article explains this same structure several times. In fact, the three main themes are mostly variations of the same claim: AI allows people to produce output without having the competence to evaluate it. The problem is that the article is criticizing a context in which one-page documents become twelve-page documents, while containing the same problem in its own form. The references also do not seem to carry much real argumentative weight. They mostly decorate an already intuitive workplace complaint with academic authority. This is something I often observe in organizations: find a topic management already wants to hear about, repeat the central thesis, and cite a large number of studies that lean in the same direction. There is also an irony here. The article criticizes a certain kind of workplace artifact, but gradually becomes very close to that artifact itself. This kind of failrue criticizing a pattern while reproducing it seems almost like a recurring custom in the programming industry. Personally, I almost regret that this person is not in the same profession as me. If someone like this had been a freelancer, perhaps the human rights of freelancers would have improved considerably.

> 'In many of the rooms I now find myself in, expertise has been asked to look the other way: to deliver faster, produce more, integrate the tools more deeply, get out of the way of the colleagues who are “getting things done”.' The entire article resonates, but that particular passage get at the core of a lot of my current frustrations around the use of these systems. Great article!

> He produced a great deal of code, a great deal of documentation, a great deal of what looked, to anyone who did not know what to look for, like progress. He could not, when asked, explain how any of it actually worked. Solution: managers need to ask 'how does $THING_YOU_MADE actually work?'. Pre-AI, it could be taken for granted that if someone was skilled enough to write complex code/documentation then they have a sound understanding of how it works. But that's no longer true. It only takes 5 minutes of questioning to figure out if they know their stuff or not. It's just that managers aren't asking (or perhaps aren't skilled enough to judge the answers). On the issue of over-enthusiasm from upper management, this may be only temporary since it makes sense to try lots of new ideas (even the crazy ones) at the start of a technological revolution. After a while it will become clearer where the gains are and the wasteful ideas will be nixed.

Fuck, yes. This. I work in an "AI-first" startup. Being "The Expert", my work has become 90% reviewing the tons of crap that confident BD people now produce, pretending to understand stuff that has never been their domain, proudly showing off their 20-pages hallucinated docs in the general chat as the achievement of their life. "Heads up folks, I wrote this doc! @OP can you review for accuracy and tone pls?" And don't hit me with the smartass "just say no", it's not an option. I tried that initially. I have a pretty senior position in the org, I complained to the CTO which I report to, and with the BD managers as well, that I do not have bandwidth to review AI-produced crap. After a couple of weeks, CEO and leadership in an org call spelling out loud that "we should collaborate and embrace AI in all our workflows, or we will be left behind". They even issued requirements to write a weekly report about "how AI improved my productivity at work this week". Luckily I am senior enough to afford ignoring these asks, but I feel bad to all my younger colleagues, which are basically forced to train their replacements. I am not even sure at this point whether this is all part of the nefarious corporate MBA "we can get finally rid of employees" wet dream, whether it's just virtue-signalling to investors, or if CEO and friends genuinely believe their own words. I have the feeling leadership (not only in my org) has gone in AI-autopilot mode and just disappeared to the sunny tropical beaches they always wanted to belong to. I would happily find another workplace at this point, but you know how the market is right now, and anyway, I have the feeling that this shit is happening pretty much anywhere money is. Everyone feels smart now, and it's a curse. God, how I hate this. It's making my life miserable.

Heh, I could do it for my subordinates (and I don't need to, I made pretty clear with them that I have zero tolerance for this shit and they seem to comply), but for other teams it's not so easy, the environment is pretty brutal in terms of politics, if I start sabotaging the "SUCCESS" of some dumb BD, the manager will comply with me and the CTO. This quote from the original blog post resonates with me: > The room had been arranged in such a way that saying so was not a contribution; his managers were too invested in the appearance of momentum to want the appearance disturbed. Yes, I know, I should learn to be more subtle. I just don't have the energy for this stuff. I am tired.

Dismissing this as just another anti-AI blog could appear a shallow dismissal, but in reality, it 8s mostly the pain of adapting to the change. The writer has certain framework of norms or world where good and bad are well defined, and that he knows what's desirable and what's not. This is not new. This happened with every new technology or paradigm change. The old norms take a while to adapt to the new world and it involves some pain, emitting writings like this one. Impersonation by using abilities that are not biologically their own, has been the strategy of dominance for human race. Horse-riding knights with bows and arrows dominated other humans that didn't have horse or arrows. What are you complaining about? Quality of the software produced? Quality of objectives? Here is the truth. None of that is the root goal. You need to change your assumptions and norms and root goals.

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.

Back around 2005, I worked with a guy who was trying to position himself as the go-to expert on the team. He'd always jump at the chance to explain things to QA and the support team. We'd occasionally hear follow-up questions from those teams and realize that he was just making things up. He was also had a serious case of cargo-cult mentality. He'd see some behavior and ascribe it to something unrelated, then insist with almost religious fervor that things had to be coded in a certain way. He was also a yes-man who would instantly cave to whatever whim management indicated. We'd go into a meeting in full agreement that a feature being requested was damaging to our users, and he'd be nodding along with management like a bobble-head as they failed to grasp the problem. Management never noticed that he was constantly misleading other teams, or that he checked in flaky code he found on the Internet that triggered multiple days of developer time to debug. They saw him as a highly productive team player who was always willing to "help" others. He ended up promoted to management. Anyway, my point is that management seems to care primarily about having their ego boosted, and about seeing what they perceive as a hard worker, even if that worker is just spinning his wheels and throwing mud on everyone else. I'm sure that AI is only going to exacerbate this weird, counter-productive corporate system.

> He ended up promoted to management. I bet, with such qualities he is VP by now.

Agreed. I mean, to me, it seems that the management tier level of people like what you described, are the people funding and marketing AI to the world. They want to maintain their status and position in the world, while lowering the value of the actual experts in the world and like this article says, feel confident in their impersonations of them.

That perfectly describes my manager.

Increasingly, there is a disconnect between established operational/corporate systems and the new AI-enhanced powers of individual workers. The over-production of documents is just one symptom. It's clear that organizations are struggling to successfully evolve in the era of worker 'superpowers'. Probably because change is hard! Perhaps this is indicative of a failure of imagination as much as anything? The AI era is not living up to its potential if workers are given superpowers, but they are not empowered to use them effectively. Empowered teams and individuals have more accountability and ownership of business outcomes - this points to a need for flatter hierarchies and enlightened governance, supported by appropriate models of collaboration and reporting (AI helps here too!). In the OP article the writer IMHO reached the wrong conclusion about their colleague who built a system that didn't work - this sounds like the sort of initiative that should be encouraged, and perhaps the failure here points to a lack of technical support and oversight of the colleague's project. Now more than ever organizations need enlightened leadership who have flexible mindsets and who are capable to envisioning and executing radicle organizational strategies.