Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
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This is what I fight against every goddamn day, and I get yelled at for fighting against it, but I’m not going to stop. I want to build shit that I can largely forget about (because, you know, it’s reliable and logically extensible and maintainable) after it gets to a mature state, and I’m not shy about making that known. This has led to more than a few significant conflicts over the course of my career. It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.
It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.
I have had several situations where I didn't even have to give knowing looks, everybody in the room knew I told them so six months ago and here it is. When that led to problems working with my leadership in the future (which happened more often than not), that was a 100% reliable sign that I would be happier and more successful elsewhere.
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As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!
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I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.
If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.
yes, 100%, do not use an LLM for anything you’re not prepared to vet and verify all of. The longer an LLM’s response the higher the odds it loses context and starts repeating or stating total gibberish or makes up data to keep going. If that’s what you want (like a list of fake addresses and phone numbers to prototype an app), great, but that’s about all it’s going to really do.
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We've hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work... the results are marginally better than either approach independently.
a negative times a negative is a positive?
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youre in luck, i offer consultation for consultancing, now give me money
This person sounds confident! You’d be stupid not to take them up on it.
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I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.
And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.
So some places started forcing developers to use AI with a quota and monitor the usage. Of course the devs don't go checking each AI generated line for correctness. That's bad for the quota. It's guaranteed to add more slop to the codebase.
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I'm still not sure how this is any different than when I used stack exchange for exactly the same thing.
Well, SE code usually compiled and did what it said. I guess that part is different.
Practically negligible then...
However how the heck have you all been using stack exchange? My questions are typically something along the lines of:
"How to use a numpy mask with pandas dataframes"
Not something that gives me 50 lines of code.
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I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.
If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.
Oh I check the citations. I'm fully aware of A.I. hallucinations.
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As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)
Getting to deprecate legacy support... Yes please, let me get my eraser.
I find most tech debt resolution adds code though.
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As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren't in your city? I may know a couple over here in England...
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And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.
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As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
Retired dev here, I'm curious about the nature of "the mess". Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like "vibe coding". If you're using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don't see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.
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As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
I imagine you aren't talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn't make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?
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What these companies didn't take the time to understand is, A.I. is a tool to make employees more efficient, not to replace them. Sadly the vast majority of these companies will also fail to learn this lesson now and will get rid of A.I. systems altogether rather than use them properly.
When I write a document for my employer I use A.I. as a research and planning assistant, not as the writer. I still put in the work writing the document, I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. In her prompts she tells it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well, produces high quality writing, and saves her a ton of time. She's actually a very competent writer herself, so when she compliments the quality I know it means something.
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McNamara fallacy at its finest. They hear figures and potential savings and then jump into the hype without considering the context. It is the same when they heard of lean manufacturing or Toyota way. Companies thought it is cost saving rather than process improvement.
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As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
Throw us some work if you like, although I already work as software engineer but wouldn’t turn down a side gig cleaning up after LLMs.
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They should have just asked me. I knew that would be the result years ago. Writing has been on the screaming wall of faces while the faces also screamed it.
Management doesn't ask people they want to fire is firing them is a good idea. They themselves would lie like crazy to keep their job and assume therefore everything the developers say would be a lie too.
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Companies with stupid leaders deserve to fail.
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My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. In her prompts she tells it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well, produces high quality writing, and saves her a ton of time. She's actually a very competent writer herself, so when she compliments the quality I know it means something.
That's a good way to use the tool. I generally use the OpenAI option to set up a custom gpt and tell it to become an expert on the subject I'm writing about, then set the parameters. Then once I've tested it on a piece of the subject matter I already understand and confirm it's working properly, I begin asking it questions. When I'm out of questions or just need a break, I go back and check the citations for each answer just to make sure I'm not getting bad data.
Once I've run out of questions and all the data is verified, I have it create an outline with a brief summary of each section. Then I take that outline and use that to guide me as I write. Also it seems like the A.I. always puts at least one section in the wrong place so that's just another reason I like to write it myself and just use an A.I. summary outline.
