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.

I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.) So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text. Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive waste of energy. If only there was some agreed-upon set of rules, structures, standards, and procedures to facilitate a more efficient communication...

It’s the Red Queen’s Race, where we all run as fast as we can to stay in exactly the same place.

The practical part of their job for them is to show up and to get paid. Who cares about features or functional - of whether they even know what functional means in that case? That's how it looks more and more...

It does not at all indicate the effort that went into doing the thing. Clearly not. I propose that what you enjoy is having a token of the appearance of effort, easily constructed and easily observed and easily suitable for low-effort handling of these proxy objects for actual work.

Lazy or efficient? A dev could spend an hour on something or 10 mins, if the outcome is the same what's does it matter?

That’s what this whole thread is about. Appearances of productivity, laziness, and the offloading of real work downstream by sending of “looks good enough” ai generated work.

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.

The US reinventing the worst parts of Soviet but putting a glossy and chipper veneer on it.

To be fair, a lot of those people were stochastically parroting by themselves for years already. They are just capable to stochastically parrot more. These companies have enough market power that they can afford to be ineffective. So they were. And they are ineffective in novel way.

This had me crack up! I used to have a colleague (senior engineer) who never cared to write a single line in Pull Request descriptions, as if other people had to magically know what he meant to achieve with such changes. Now? His PRs have a full page description with "bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries"!

My colleague had a problem with commit messages, so now they're all written by AI. I don't know what depth of hell he managed to get the prompt from, but they're all now in the format "Updated /path/to/file: fixed issue in thingamabob", which means they're all at least 200 characters long and half of it is the file path, an absolutely pointless thing to put in a commit message. The best part is that whenever you look at GitLab or GitHub, instead of seeing the commit message next to the file you just see the file name again, then the message is cut off.

I write the words that I hear in my head, as though I am speaking. With the exception of timed, in-class essays, I always turned in papers far in excess of any minimum during high school. In college, I took a constructive writing course because I thought "Hey, easy A!" After the second or third week, the professor told me that, while the class had a word minimum, I would also be given a separate word maximum . She said I needed to learn brevity and simplicity, before anything else. The point being: I was able to cruise through high school with my longwindedness as a cheat code, never stressing about minimum lengths, despite my writing being crap in other ways. Although I have regressed in the two decades since, it helped me a good deal. I am grateful to that professor for doing that.

> Don't you get dinged as a slow performer? No because the document is not the work. Management wants someone to figure out the solution to their problems. The document is just a step in solutioning. Without the doc, others would have to re-do all that work if you get hit by a bus. Or you’d be stuck in endless meetings conveying the vision instead of figuring out the next problem. Document length is inversely proportional to the quality of your thinking/insight. When you create fluff, everyone can see you didn’t do the work.

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.

And they are generating the longer version with AI, that you are then using AI to summarize. This is not adding value for anyone except people whose function is to look busy, and people trying to avoid their busy work.

If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me. Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds. Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality. The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about performative quality. Everything was verbose and had to be by the book, even when it didn't make sense from an engineering or product point of view. Different opinions were simply not accepted. It was the age of bloat, of thousands of dependencies, of nitpicks, of infinite meetings, of quality in paper but not in practice, of doing overtime, of being on a fucking pager, of having CI/CD that took 10 hours to merge, and all the stress it comes with. I would be totally ok if all those “professional” engineers from that generation were to be replaced with hackers, both old and new.

I recognise it from regularly talking with fellow programmers at the local tech meet-ups. At least in my area, the work places with result-oriented policies were and still are in the clear majority, and only big companies with likewise big financial reserves could afford to pursue the economically wasteful route of process-oriented policies.

There’s no need to defend LLMs. The article is making the point that a colleague who shouldn’t have been anywhere near specifying work for LLMs to do, was able to fake it and get rewarded for it.

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.

I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.

> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)

Counter-question: if quite a lot of things have also been like this before to a lesser degree, should we not oppose efforts to make everything like this to a greater degree ?

I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again. The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.

The more difficult it is to trace one’s labour to output.. expect more theatrics ;)

> 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.

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)

We don't need AI for not producing anything of value in a large company, though it certainly helps us produce even less!

And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.

Software Engineering seems to be quite unique to enable this due to few factors: * Many software engineers didn't do real engineering work during their entire careers. In large companies it's even harder - you arrive as a small gear and are inserted into a large mechanism. You learn some configuration language some smart-ass invented to get a promo, "learn" the product by cleaning tons of those configs, refactoring them, "fixing" results in another bespoke framework by adjusting some knobs in the config language you are now expert in. Five years pass and you are still doing that. * There are many near-engineering positions in the industry. The guy who always told how he liked to work with people and that's why stopped coding, another lady who always was fascinated by the product and working with users. They all fill in the space in small and large companies as .*M * The train is slow moving, especially in large companies. Commit to prod can easily span months, with six months being a norm. For some large, critical systems, Agentic code still didn't reach the production as of today. Considering above, AI is replacing some BS jobs, people who were near-code but above it suddenly enjoy vibe-coding, their shit still didn't hit the fan in slow moving companies. But oh man, it looks like a productivity boom.

Finally someone who nailed this problem. In the age of AI you need smart people who are aligned with the organization more than ever. If people aren't aligned with the organization then bad, BAD things happen when the political people get access to AI and there's basically nothing you can do about it. They can use AI to fake things for a very extended time, then always find the most optimal way to cover up the problem before the consequences surface and at that point they've already moved so far up the ladder that the consequences don't matter to them anymore. IMO I think it's actively unsolvable in any org that is already deeply infested with politics. On the other hand, having really smart people has massively increased in value. The only way to surface them is through naturally selecting on actual merit which only an entrepreneurship environment can reliably provide. All of this means that I think startups with star teams are going to absolutely dominate for a few years (as in not just executing faster but with less bandwidth, but literally outright winning in everything) until near-full AI automation starts making the big firms win again simply by virtue of throwing tokens at the problem.

>People who cannot write code are building software. People who have never designed a data system are designing data systems. Most of it is not shipped; it is built, often for many hours, possibly shown internally with great vigor, used quietly, and occasionally surfaced to a client without much fanfare. This made me think of How I ship projects at big tech companies [1], specifically "Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111031

Yea, I remember that one. Great article. Also spawned a decent discussion about how optics and "keeping up appearances" always matters, often a lot more than we think they do.

One of the bitter lessons I learned in my SWE career is that looking the part is almost everything. The meme boomer advice of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" is remarkably true if you broaden the definition of "dress". Race, gender, lookism, age, everything matters in your career. Career progression gets easier just by being the right age, or being the right race (whatever that is at your company), or being the right gender (again, depends on your company). Grooming and personal fitness are easy wins. I've never seen an obese or unkempt executive or middle manager. Even the way you move makes a difference. If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever. Leadership-track people leave the office early even if it means taking work home, because it shows that you have your shit together. Leadership-track people eat lunch alone, not at the gossipy "worker's table". And of course, the way you dress matters (men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite). It's all about keeping up appearances.

I remember learning this lesson. I’d bought some new clothes and worn them to the office. I got more appreciation from my manager than from the entire heroic 6 month death march to ship the last product release.

> If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever I have never heard this said before. I wonder how true it is in general

If you stay late it looks like a) you're struggling, b) you're a try-hard, c) you don't have a life after work. One of the most actionable low-hanging career advices I could give is be among the first ones to pack up and leave for the day. You can always continue working at home if you're not done.

When I worked for a crypto startup early in my career, we were once chastised because no one was in the office at 6:30pm. Some engineers (including me) did mostly work from home but most people, engineers and non engineers alike, mostly worked from the office. And a couple years ago I did a short consulting stint for an AI startup (I know how to pick the bubbles huh?) where I shipped something at around 6pm my time, got a call at 9pm their time to talk about it, and then he asked me "what are you working on tonight?" I quit the next day. Anyway, this advice confuses me because many companies see staying late as a badge of commitment. Maybe it doesn't apply to startups.

If that happens globally where AGI and engineer replacement is "shipped" as a social construct, I'm afraid real software engineers (who can write and understand production ready systems) will be the vocal minority who can't do anything.

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!

This reminds me of a workplace where I spent many years. I asked several people what it meant for something to be "released" and nobody could tell me. I never even knew after I became a project manager.

This reminds me of a workplace where I spent many years. I asked several people what it meant for something to be "released" and nobody could tell me. I never even knew after I became a project manager. This was at a company that made hardware products.

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.

I've noticed early into AI adoption in the workplace that some colleagues took advantage of the technology by appearing to be hyper-proactive; New TODs weekly, fresh new refactoring ideas, novel ways to solve age-old problems with shiny new algorithms. Fast-forward to today, and this is occurring two-fold. Not only are they trying to appear more proactive, combining this with the fear of AI layoffs, they're creating solutions to problems before the problem has even been fully defined. For example, I was tasked to look into a company-wide solution for a particular architectural problem. I thought delivering a sound solution would give me some kudos, alas, I wasn't fast enough. An intern had already figured it out and wrote a TOD. I find myself too tired to compete.

That’s the thing, if you don’t use it someone else will And it’s hard to argue against seemingly instant results

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.

> The article almost reads like a practical manual for increasing perceived productivity inside a company. I think the truth is that at many (most?) places, perceived productivity and convincing is all that matters. You don't actually have to be productive if you can convince the right people above you that you are productive. You don't have to have competence if you can convince them of your competence. You don't have to have a feasible proposal if you can convince them it is feasible. And you don't have to ship a successful product if you can convince them it is successful. It isn't specifically about AI or LLMs. AI makes the convincing easier, but before AI, the usual professional convincers were using other tools to do the convincing. We've all worked with a few of those guys whose primary skill was this kind of convincing, and they often rocket up high on the org chart before perception ever has a chance to be compared with reality.

> because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about > time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed. I work at MSFT and at-least in my org, this is happening at warp speed. Every document I read, my first thoughts are what is the kernel of the idea that the writer was trying to convey ? Because 95% of the content of the doc is just verbiage. You can always tell its verbiage, the em-dashes, the rhythmic text, the green check mark emoji etc. We are hoping that volume of output will make up for the quality or lack thereof. More markdown files, more AGENTS.md file but is that making us better developers ? It certainly is giving the illusion that we are faster but I don't know how management thinks this will lead to tangible impact on the top line or bottom line. In my experience, some of the best writing (in design docs and PM specs) at MSFT have been human written. You can see the clarity of purpose from the writer, ithere is no need to read it again, it is equivalent to having a 1-on-1 with the writer themselves. But AI written slop, the less said the better. This piece hits home, I wonder how the experience is at other Big Tech companies.

Worse: it’s the confident prolific idiot, the most dangerous kind.

As someone who's been an engineer for 36 years and is now solo, you have a genuinely interesting perspective on performative productivity vs. actual output.

I think the author is describing the new incarnation of the Death March. In the Death March, contributors know that an active project will be dead-on-arrival, or cannot be redeemed. Maybe a small difference here being that the AI-equipped contributors won't be aware of the project status (i.e. futile). Maybe this means AI has democratized Death Marches.

I was tasked with coming up with a solution in 5 weeks which took another firm six months to produce. Never used agentic coding so much before or knew my code less well. Requirements are garbage though ,vague and just "copy what these other guys did, but better". I tried for. Couple of the weeks to get better specs but eventually gave up and just started building stuff to present.

So the opposite of quiet quitting is loud slopping?

So artificially productive you que up the crap you do and slowly release it?

"AI speedtracks bullshit shops into bullshit factories" is the other side of "AI enables efficiency gains beyond immagination". As a freelancer I get to see both in action. No surprise! Do you rememeber agile? Sometimes it was pragmatically applied towards efficiency, sometimes it became a bullshit religion full of priest and ceremonies. And on i could go, with more examples, the gist stays the same : new tools, speed increase, faster crash or faster travel depends on the trajectory the company/team/project/thing was already on. A special note on "People who cannot write code are building software." "Fuck yeah" to that! Devs has shipped bad software to people in other departements/domains, for ages. They would never build something better if what they had was good in the first place. When we (coders/startups) were doing it it was "innovation", now is "elephants in the china shop"? And this is not a rethorical snappy question: that IS innovation, instead of critizing the "wrong schema" ... understand the idea, help build it and do the job: ship code that works and is safe. Also, grey-beard here, pls, don't think you can ever have a stable job especially when code is around. It keeps changing, it always has, it always will. AI bringing unprecedented changes is hype. The world always changed fast. If "you" picked software development because of salary, you are in danger. If you did it because you love it, then tell me with a straight face this is not one of the best moments to be alive.

Problem is that it does not produce better or more work, it actually shifts the work to a different/future engineer. Today’s slop which gets engineer 1 a promotion, is engineer’s 2 problem next month when they are oncall and the codebase makes no sense. Your horse riding analogy, is like riding a horse into battle without your weapon because it’s slowing you down. Sure you got through the enemy first by outmanoeuvring, but you missed the point all together. Maybe you got a shiny medal but all your mates are dead.

It would be nice if someone invented a mouse with a tiny motor inside, so I could put on sunglasses, rest my hand on the mouse, doze off, and still look like I'm working hard.

It's called a wrist watch with a moving second hand. Just put your current mouse on top of that.

The preferred solution actually moves my arm around a bit so that it works in a physical office. For remote work, there are so called "mouse jigglers" [1], but those do not require sunglasses to work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_jiggler

Yeah but mouse jigglers 1/ have to be plugged in / occupy a USB port, 2/ usually don't turn off when LOGOFF, resulting in battery depletion and 3/ don't work on remote servers where you would want an RDP session to stay open but there are group policies that prevent it. I wrote a small C utility that avoids all 3 problems and now I couldn't live without it!

That’s neat, but they’re talking Weekend at Bernie’s style, in a physical office.

Throughout my career many people have believed such bullshit illuminated their productivity. What has gotten me promoted in the past was doing the opposite, as in trying to not appear busy. If you have to justify your existence then your reason for existing is not well justified.

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.

I find it astounding how otherwise intelligent people fall for such obvious theatre. One really does need a particular mindset to filter this out, and that is almost entirely absent from typical management. As usual, if you don't have an actual reliable signal, or acquiring that signal takes too long - you'll fall back to relying on cheap proxy signals. Confidence over competence, etc. And those that are best at self-promotion and politics win. I've got recent experience in exactly this - someone who is completely out of their depth, mis-representing their actual capabilities. Their reliance on AI is so strong because of this lack of depth - to such a degree that they never learn anything. Lately they've been creating drama and endless discussions about dumb things to a) try to appear like they have strong opinions, and b) to filabust the time so they don't have to talk about important things related to their work output.