- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
You must log in or register to comment.
What I really want to know is, were the people putting out workslop, putting out anything better BEFORE AI. I mean, maybe they are just using a different tool to suck.
I think instead of stating that their performance was going to be measured by the quantitative measure of how much AI they used, instead of the qualitative measure of output, while making AI available to them, the CEO might have seen different results.
It’s almost like malicious compliance. “Hey everyone, do this.” Then they all do JUST that. What would you expect? LOL.
“What separates workslop from low-quality work done by humans is that workslop looks legitimate on the surface while lacking the components that would make it useful.”
Lacking optional things like the truth/verifiable fact, substance/depth of any kind, a basic contextual understanding of the shared reality of the broader team or vendors, an actual point of view beyond the status quo and any creative thought or truly new ideas.
You asked for it, you got it.
Literally a meeting at work today.
Director: “Why was this requirement missed?”
PM: “Well, my understanding is that AI was used to write the requirements and that AI was also used to generate the code and perform code reviews. …So there were no actual people who understood the requirements involved in the process. Also, this seems to be becoming more and more of a problem.”
Director: “Oh. Uh… Ok. Maybe don’t bring up “AI” whenever you discuss this with senior management because I’m not sure how well that will go over. Just say, ‘the requirements were missed.’”
PM: …
We need to stop replacing software devs with LLMs and instead replace managment with LLMs!
Couldn’t be any worse
No one read the PRD in detail! Shocking
Edit: This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo
This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo
That would actually make meetings a valuable use of our time which is exactly why it won’t happen.
Is the AI is being used what’s the Project Manager for?
Yeah, good employees state their grievance, but if management insists, they just go into bot mode and do what has been commanded until they switch jobs. And bad employees are happy to blame AI.
So if management demands use of AI rather than just offering AI as yet another tool that may or may not be used at the discretion of the employee, output quality will either stay the same or degrade because AI can’t do the actually important job - quality assurance.The moral of the story: if you aren’t actually experienced doing the job yourself, do not tell your workers how to do the job. Trust your senior workers to do that.
This is actually an argument I was having about two hours ago with my managers. They want to replace a bunch of low level workers with AI, and have the remaining low level workers use the AI to do the job of the lost workers. Their justification for this is that the engineers have been using AI for over a year now and performance has improved, (I don’t actually know if performance has improved, but they say it has).
And what you said was basically my point, sure performance improves when engineers use AI because the people using the AI, are engineers, they can tell when the AI has given them something worth working with, and they can tell when it hasn’t. The low level workers can’t do that, I had an argument with one of them this morning because they kept insisting that the computer tower was a CPU, and kept calling it that. How is someone like that going to be able to tell if the AI has given them good output or not?
I think it’s more likely the engineers are made to spend a bunch of time writing meaningless fluff emails nobody reads and now they use AI to generate emails that the manager summarises with AI and pretends to read.
Maybe you shouldn’t have insisted your employees use it then, in the hopes that you’d be able to fire most of them.
The hope is to fire all of them. The plan is to fire most of them.
Then after the company crashes they’ll pull their golden parachute and take a position at the next doomed company.
Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?
Well, yeah, the problem with LLMs in a professional context is exactly that the second order effects of using them are so bad that they wipe out the direct effect gains (the time saving in creating the text).
It’s fine for entertainment if all you want is to be distracted for a while with some somewhat bland chewing-gum for the brain.
CEO Tobias Lütke… told employees last year that using AI is “a baseline expectation,” and they should first prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more resources.
Isn’t this an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
It looks like an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Just playing uhm angels advocate? Not sure how to call it, the naive optimist perhaps!
Not necessarily: the statement (in isolation) is a call to learn and become capable to explain limitations. The criticized effect is basically “people not being able to explain the limits”.
I suspect that “finding limits” wasn’t incentived though (and I mean things like positive feedback, not money). And then you get shit-in-shit-out factories.
Or to rephrase your statement: If you want to play a game then stick to the rules you’ve set up - otherwise everyone’s allowed to cheat.
Ok, sure
However
In this case everyone that had a connection to reality told him that’s not a reasonable baseline.
You can force everyone to use it, but then you are working against that
Not exactly setting up your workforce for a win
I would love to find anything that had a more positive outlook … but alas perhaps I should ask OpenGrok because my creativity is not enough.
Fuck em.
A hammer makes a poor substitute for a knife & fork.
He said AI is helping workers produce more output, but the quality of it is so bad that their colleagues have to spend more time fixing it
Everyone predicted this. Why the fuck didn’t the billionaires? What is their major malfunction?
They are still making money hand over foot and they’ve doubled down on it. I smell bubble getting larger before pop.
If a billionaire bought a ticket to the Powerball lottery and won they would attribute that win to their superior “genius”, “work ethic” and deep strategy.
Survivorship bias is a helluva drug.
I got let go from a job about a year ago because I said this and showed the data to support my claim in reaponse to why it was taking me a while to complete some work. I was “not a good culture fit”
Not even predicted. This is what everyone realized the second they started having to use Ai tools at work. This has been wide knowledge for a year or two, and likely known by those doing early tests with it prior.
They’re all conservatives. Conservatives are profoundly unintelligent by nature. Just the dumbest cockroaches to ever infest a planet.
Oh it is simple, they are fucking dumb. Always have been. If they do have some brain cells to rub together they will get stuck on short term gains for themselves which in the long run is fucking dumb.
Either way you slice it dumb, just fucking dumb.
We don’t live in a meritocratic society, especially at the higher levels.
Right mommy, right daddy, right school, knowing the right people, right way of talking - that’s far more important to end up a CEO than competence.
I’m surprised it’s not more obvious. Tons of CEOs tank their companies and fail upwards into boards and other CEO positions of multi-billion dollar companies because they completely mismanaged the company but somehow rich people are geniuses?
We’re all supposed to believe that the rich are rich because of their own merit and the poor are poor because of their own lack of merit, so that we don’t force the rich contribute more to the public pot so that the poor aren’t poor.
So the relentless propaganda we’re bombarded with in the media is that the rich are great and amazing people who got to were they are due to their hard work and intelligence (notice how Bill Gate’s mother who was a member of the board of IBM was never mentioned in the press when talking about “his” success with Microsoft) whom we should all look up to whilst in the last couple of decades we’ve been seeing more and more in the rightwing press stories about how the poor are lazy and dependent on benefits (aka social security if in America).
The poor aren’t the ones who own TV Channels, Newspapers and (in countries that have that) end up in the boards of publicly owned TV Channels and Newspapers.
Because they always think they’re the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.
It’s not uncommon with narcissists.
Because they always think they’re the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.
They are wrong in this belief because being idiots they don’t have the capacity to be aware that they are idiots. But generally this belief is true. It is more positively expressed in these words: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” When I look at the dismal state of software, I see crap everywhere. With the rise of slop generators this is bound to become worse.
It’s about their personality disorder, not their intelligence.
Billionaires, that’s the malfunction, time to dine yet?
Honestly, its beyond billionaires. Even upper management and smaller business owners are slopping up the koolaid like its nobody’s business. They feel like they just got that secret weapon to lord over all their employees or fix every problem they couldn’t manage.
There’s really this maliciousness to it. The way they talk down and chew out people objecting or raising concerns. There’s this mask off righteousness and entitlement to them that I’ve rarely seen before.
They believe they are 100% they are in the right and nothing will stop them.
I agree totally but I call anyone else out think I’ve got some bs glitchin this or watchin me. I’m old enough not to give a fuck, yet young enough to end a chuck of them push comes to shove
maybe when red state gasoline hits 7.50
No one tells them no
They did, but they knew they could make money out of it anyway.
They think it’s worth it to scare employees and suppress wages.
Even if it costs more to fix the mistakes it might actually be cheaper if people don’t win wage increases and layoffs continue.
I’m not saying this will work but it seems to be at least part of the logic.
they are billionaires. they just want more hot air for their bubble i sure know they have lots of it in the bottom area behind them
deleted by creator
Lmao I am living this right now at work 🥲
Yep. We have a guy on the team who generates document after document for us to review and it’s all slop that he has no understanding of (not that anyone could understand the mostly nonsense)
Did you not get to reject all of that yet?
I wish. Our company is still at the “you must adopt and use AI” phase. I’m looking forward to the “Holy fuck that’s expensive! Be careful of your usage” phase
We passed the “Holy fuck that’s expensive!” phase a few months ago and have moved on to the “Use AI for everything but don’t actually do that just use it for some things why [didn’t/did] you use AI for that we can’t afford the [additional time/Azure bill] hahahahahahahaha.” phase. Swap the values in brackets at random on any given day.
My org saw AI as a threat and immediately banned it (blocking websites and restricting features in apps) until our IT folks could evaluate it and implement safeguards. Incidentally, they missed the window when vendors were more or less offering it for free. Now any AI solution doesn’t just have to be vetted against our security and privacy needs, but most likely requires a darn good business case, RFP’s, quotes, and contracts.
It never became a part of the culture here, much to our benefit.
This is also what I don’t get. At worst people start ignoring the documents or requests for review (or code changes) because they have better things to do than review generated text.
At best you push back.
With CEOs - we need to switch to REAL grenades.
Tobias Lütke’s net worth is over 12 billion, like all billionaires he won’t have an income. He’ll be buying assets at an inflated price then taking out bank loans against them - a process that inflates prices on things like realestate and land (because the more they pay the more they can borrow from the bank).
Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes. They want to be paid in stocks, assets, and live tax free off never ending bank loans. He’ll they’ll buy media companies just to borrow against them, they’ll buy lobbying companies… And they’ll use them to make society worse (on top of the inflation they create).
…and the increased roads, infrastructure, costs to the community? Who covers their tax burden? That hole in the tax system? They use tax loopholes, so YOU cover their tax burdens. YOU do.
Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes.
The most infuriating part of this? Mr. Lütke endorses the idea of granting more votes to those who pay more income tax, including stripping the right to vote from people who do not pay income tax.
He has also called pensioners ‘dependents’ who shouldn’t get to vote:
New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.
https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-pensioners-voting-rights
He has also called pensioners ‘dependents’ who shouldn’t get to vote
Amusingly I’m pretty sure this would tank the conservative vote pretty badly in most Anglophone countries. It certainly would in the UK.
Well, considering I paid more in income tax than Bezos did, I think that’s a pretty damn good idea
I spent half my day dealing with a slop grenade.
Someone came in and dropped a (bunch of) AI generated PRs. Said person knows nothing about my world, but they want cost optimization and Fable runs through logs and gives them code. Second Fable review agent tries the code, it doesn’t work. Gives suggestions to first. New commit comes in with workaround, I decline this because it’s a shit and had another unnoticed critical integration bug. This goes on a few more times.
It comes back a fifth or so time with something that is now technically correct, but fucking horrifying. Great, now I don’t know what to do, because I’m getting told it’ll fix the billing issue and this is a huge problem, but the code is insane.
This is a cost optimization PR, advertising massive savings, but the numbers seemed way off. It turns out it looked at one day with a runaway process that racked up insane billing (90% of year-to-date total project cost) and “annualized” it, and that was the savings. But further, it calculated all the costs using the wrong billing system, so all the numbers were wrong.
When I recalculated and corrected it, the whole thing saves us $6/month, because we don’t have runaway outages very often.
This is on top of every ticket I get is Claude generated, they never just state the fucking issue, and 100% of tickets in 2 weeks plus today I’ve received were inaccurate and wrong.
I hate the slop. I hate the non technical users throwing the slop on me without knowing how it works.
Take whatever prompt you put in the AI and write exactly that for the ticket content, then spend 30 seconds summarizing it into a title. I don’t care if it’s “customer wants a button that shows a cat”, just write that.
I cannot take another “client has a load bearing contract dispute with sales. Genuinely the verdict here will secure the shape of the contract. Critically in foo.py function get_foo_blorp there is no reference to felis catus to satisfy hard customer requirement. Acceptance requirement: return felis catus when module controller clicked and client is logged in and client’s birthday is in same month, otherwise return error codes 412 404 526” word salad ticket that doesn’t just state the problem.
I think a good way around this is that any project submissions using AI must include draft material to show how much data was used vs generated. We will never get away from AI at this stage but we need to get to a trust but verify stage. Even if they built the whole thing with AI they should be able to show the amount of tokens used in the entire to generate it (more generally means they have spent time refining whatever it is)
We need to get away from AI=Bad and rather use AI as tools and don’t help it replace us by showing 100% generated work as your own. Me using AI to make something is going to be much more polished and refined vs your general office worker. We need proper AI classes to help show people how to use it responsibly and collaboratively so we can cut down on the amount of duplicate work being generated as if we can cut down processing power it also cuts down the pollution generated.
how else is ai slop going to be monetized? more slop more hallucinations more bubble.
I’m finding it hard to reconcile the people who find it useless with those who find it useful. My own experience with languages is that it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify, but with ones I don’t it can slow me down doing the verification and fixes.
I know software developers in a Fortune 500 company who swear that overall they are far more productive with “agents”. I don’t know if it’s a highly tailored system rather than the more all-purpose ones the general public have. So I do wonder if there are use cases for it.
It’s ruining the planet and our societies, though. And it’s distracting us from what really matters. Net negative for sure.
Edit: they’re also not very good at their most basic tasks. Researchers have found that when the major LLMs summarise articles, it misrepresents the facts 51% of the time.
It’s like a flamethrower, if you’re clearing brush it helps you go ten times faster. But if you dont know what you’re doing you’ll burn the whole property to the ground.
it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify
The issue is that the executives only see the potential to speed up, and not the necessity of having skilled people who can do that verifying.
Agents is just the LLM prompting itself with subtasks. This can be helpful to compartmentalize larger and more complex tasks. I find the tool calls most important. An agent that can compile and test its own code will make fewer mistakes (assuming the tests weren’t also written by LLMs but even then).
So there’s a self-correcting feedback loop that will improve quality, but is also a lot more expensive. The problem is that the temptation is huge to give more and more complex tasks to the agents and then they go off for 30min or longer and may or may not create complete and utter bullshit because something led them astray or they forgot something one agent did wrong and never fixed it. The end result may work, but it may be less efficient or come with a share of dead code that’s never called etc.
You end up with hundreds of lines to verify. You could just ask an agent to do it, but at some point adding more agents to the pile is not going to help… and probably takes longer than just reading it yourself.
Yeah strong black/white opinions on AI annoy the hell out of me. I find some AI tooling really helpful like fancy line completions and using conversationalLLMs as a last resort to solving problems, but I hate anything to do with agents or vibe coding in general if only just because I don’t want the field I enjoy so much being entirely replaced with being a project manager for a computer.
It makes me frustrated trying to talk about this stuff on Lemmy or other places though because it always ends up being two battling sides of “A SINGLE GENERATED CHARACTER MEANS THE ENTIRE PROJECT IS SLOP!!!” and “ANYONE WHO ISN’T VIBING OUT MILLIONS OF LOC WITH 100 DIFFERENT AGENTS GOING AT ONCE MAY AS WELL JUST KILL THEMSELVES!!!”
I can kinda get the sentiment behind that polarization. There’s such a strong drift towards LLM use that it takes hardline stances to try and slow it down
I find it can speed me up, but it’s very easy to become lazy and find myself asking the AI to do things I could do perfectly well myself, quickly and using far less electricity. And then before I know it I have a huge pile of slop that I don’t know my way around, and I spend the time on the other end trying to understand and check it all. It feels amazing up front, but you pay later.
Yeah, it seems like a new type of judgement is needed that I don’t normally encounter in a day. Like, I use a hammer to hammer nails, then I put it down. I don’t try to cook with it. This tool has a weird, abstract nature to it where you can drift between using / misusing / abusing without necessarily noticing. A strange position to be in while trying to work at the same time .
For corporate software, there’s so many bugfixes and features, which require so few additions/changes that it’s faster to do it than to write the prompt.
But obviously only if you’re able to hold the entire codebase in your skull, but a proficient developer should be able to do so.
If people begin outsourcing these changes to LLMs, then they’re cooked and no longer able to verify the output.
My code adjacent work is much faster, but programming itself is about the same.
So if I need to make a data visualization or UI for data input it’s way better, but if I have to do an analysis or build something it sucks all the knowledge out of the task and takes twice as long. At least. Because unless I’m forming a strong understanding of the information the task can’t progress.
I have no idea if LLMs actually make me faster in the aggregate, but I’m more interested in using them to be better. For example, having a LLM review some code, or share a plan for and have it point out all of the flaws in your reasoning or alternatives you never considered.
