So the VP of Eng has started a monthly engineering-wide forum where he encourages us to ask him “the hard questions.” Last week someone finally asked him the questions we’ve all been thinking about the weirdly AI-shilling changes he’s been making. This week he quietly fired the person who asked.

It’s kind of sad actually to see what happened to the company I work for. It’s not the thing it used to be, because it no longer has the people it used to have, and the people are the thing.

VP of Eng just straight up told us that we are now required to use AI coding tools because they spent a shitload of money on them and want to see “value” for that investment lol

"Once AI improves productivity we'll finally achieve the post-scarcity utopia where everyone has their needs met because so much stuff gets produced for so little effort!" "Actually we can do that now" "No"

Because a calculator is a device made for a specific purpose, our trust in it would be immediately corrupted if it were to give an incorrect answer. It would be useless. If you take away the specific purpose you also take away the criteria to determine if something works or not.

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results: 1) Does UBI work? (yes) 2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

Imagine that we are roommates. You ask me to restock the toilet paper. To prove that I did so, I show you the receipt. The next morning, when you are in need of toilet paper, you find that the drawer is empty. This is because I have invented a new innovative method that I call Lean Shopping. 1/

A few months ago we kicked off an initiative to rewrite an entire internal application. The goal was to automate a frustrating manual process for the sales department. The new plan, as of several months later, is to rewrite a new application that *adds more steps* instead.

My small company’s weekly all hands meeting has turned into a weekly AI shilling presentation desperately trying to convince employees to use AI. Most of the ads for this company are enticing artists to contribute by advertising how anti-AI we are. These two things do not add up.

Another cutesy term. Can you guess what "quiet cracking" is? Yeah, it's a real thing that already exists called BURNOUT. Giving it a cute name only serves to hide that companies are designing the workplace to cause burnout, taking away people's ability to choose to work sustainably.

The biggest impact of LLMs has not been due to the technology's capabilities, but rather its flaws. Because the AI revolution must succeed at any cost, but the actual tech is shit, orgs demanding more AI outputs MUST lower their bar for quality. This creates space for UX malpractice to take root.

I can't help but wonder whether (much like any other cult) people join the AI hype circle jerk because they are lonely and want to feel part of something bigger than themselves

is AI real life is it just fantasy caught up in the hype no escape from reality

lmao, also lol

A propos of nothing, anyone remember the dot com bubble?

when the AI bubble finally collapses and everyone who spent a year smugly hyping it suddenly has to come crawling back with their tail between their legs, i just want to say i am not going to be the bigger person about it. i am going to be meaner than you can even believe

it is actually, literally insane to me that the big "improvement" they're trying to sell us is a computer that doesn't compute, can't do math, won't follow orders and just spits out whatever it wants

I think it would be fun if every time you make a request to an LLM, the response included a little chart that updated each time with the cumulative amount of power and water the model has used that day, with some friendly comparisons for context.

“I use genAI for—“ blocked. “I don’t normally repost genAI but this image is so—“ I don’t normally block you but now i do. “But I only use it when—“ lol blocked. “But what about—“ idc blocked.

Every second AI headline right now reads to me like "Eating hot dogs might cure cancer, says owner of hot dog cart"

You don’t say. (They are, in other words, not reasoning.) 🤨

After months of being pressured to work nights and weekends, writing our own requirements and ACs because the EM didn’t know how, and being told to deprioritize critical features in favor of speed… we finally launched it!! It’s an inferior product that does the job worse than legacy did!! Woooh!

Fun fact: Both the quality and quantity of a dev’s output is inversely correlated to the extra hours you try to pressure them into working. … Until you tell them they “have to work the weekend,” at which point it drops to 0 as they will all quit and you will learn they never “have to” do anything.

when people call it the "AI bubble" this is what they mean

AI is a wonder technology that is going to change every industry, which is why - people have to be forced to use it - people have to be tricked into paying for it - people who do use it on purpose have to hide it from their peers to avoid being mocked

MBAs: The site is down! Devs: We know. It’s a dependency issue, we just have to wait it out. MBAs: Fix it! Devs: Literally not possible. MBAs: But aren’t you aware the site is down?? Why aren’t you trying to fix it?? Devs: We know the cause. It can only be fixed by our dependency. MBAs: SO TRY! 😒

Yesterday my boss had the audacity to tell the team “if these don’t get done this week, we may have to work through the weekend.” Lol. That better have been the royal we, because I’m certainly not cancelling my weekend plans. Best of luck to him I guess.

Today I was instructed to start moving JIRA tickets into the next status before they’re actually ready, because the VP “likes to see the tickets move.”

Mindblowing idea: Sales and Marketing people should be required to restate their ideas in plain language without using obscuring business-coded jargon. If they can’t, or if they suddenly require a bunch of caveats to not sound criminal, the idea should be thrown out.

Stakeholders finally started getting exposure to our product and apparently had a lot of questions about why a bunch of requirements were deprioritized / ignored without consulting them. Engineering Manager couldn’t answer. Now suddenly our (lovely) QA Director is running the project. 💀

Despite my best efforts I'm writing about AI again. Tomorrow's issue of Product Picnic is channeling Ed Zitron. AI is no longer optional: it's forced into every product you use and scraping every word you write. If the past decades were the age of user centered design, now is the age of no consent.

i can't believe microsoft expects people who have been using microsoft products for 40 years to trust an ai made by the same people

61: Similarly if you "expect people to come to you with solutions, not problems" and your only contribution is to give the go-ahead to do the solution, that is not a job

65: story point estimates are not a good use of anybody's time

Oh that engineering manager? We fired her. She kept warning us about how this or that would break the tech stack and would take months to do properly. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear from a *team player*, so we replaced her with someone who wouldn’t be such a drag!

The company has now made an “AI Transparency” page that claims they forbid AI content, but makes no mention of the top-down internal push to force all engineers to use LLMs. There’s no acceptable explanation for these blatant lies. It’s either stupidity or malice and neither is a good look.

Excellent article about how LLMs perform their feats of "magic" by exploiting the same psychological hacks that psychics do when performing cold readings. ::Chefs kiss:: softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...

I’ve slowly watched every priority in my workplace shift from actual customer satisfaction to SEO and Core Web Vitals. Everything is now about pleasing Lord Google and integrating “AI”. It doesn’t matter that customers don’t want it. They don’t matter any more. Only Google and ChatGPT matter.

What ChatGPT has made even clearer to me is that there is a large population of people who have no opinions of their own, no taste of their own, no feelings or thoughts of their own, or if they have them, they don't trust them. They would outsource thinking to a spouse or parent before, now it's AI

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

my new ai device will sit in a beer garden that backs onto a small river and drink three to five pints on a sunny late summer afternoon for you, leaving you free for more meetings and business calls

Silicon Valley loves to pretend it's all about science and logic, but it's run by the least logical, least evidence-based, most emotional men on the planet.

Not a huge surprise that LLMs are making people stupider but I have to admit I'm a little shocked at how quickly it's happening

Engineering Managers these days really have the audacity. You didn't even actually look at the product before giving an estimate for feature release, and now you want US to work nights and weekends to meet your nonsensical due date? You're a jokester, truly.

Hey chat. If my company goes from almost 50% women to like one single woman in the span of one year and most of them have been required to sign NDAs upon departure, does that bode poorly? Asking for a friend.

MBAs are so fascinating in their inability to operate without the illusion of certainty. They want a deadline. If the answer is "it'll be done when it's done" (aka reality), they just want you to make something up. Then if you miss the 100% completely made up deadline, everyone panics.