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Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

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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!

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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    AI: The new outsourcing?

  • 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.)

    They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they'll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.

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    No, people need to stop making shit about race or skin if you want to beat racism. We are all people in the end.
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    I love how they put up the English name after the first outcry of "where do I send the ambulance again" fears.
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    Right on, thanks for the info!
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    G
    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
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    whotookkarl@lemmy.worldW
    It's not a back door, it's just a rear entryway
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    If I went to the USA now, they'd probably put me there after looking at my social media activity anyway
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    I see your point but also I just genuinely don't have a mind for that shit. Even my own close friends and family, it never pops into my head to ask about that vacation they just got back from or what their kids are up to. I rely on social cues from others, mainly my wife, to sort of kick start my brain. I just started a new job. I can't remember who said they were into fishing and who didn't, and now it's anxiety inducing to try to figure out who is who. Or they ask me a friendly question and I get caught up answering and when I'm done I forget to ask it back to them (because frequently asking someone about their weekend or kids or whatever is their way of getting to share their own life with you, but my brain doesn't think that way). I get what you're saying. It could absolutely be used for performative interactions but for some of us people drift away because we aren't good at being curious about them or remembering details like that. And also, I have to sit through awkward lunches at work where no one really knows what to talk about or ask about because outside of work we are completely alien to one another. And it's fine. It wouldn't be worth the damage it does. I have left behind all personally identifiable social media for the same reason. But I do hate how social anxiety and ADHD makes friendship so fleeting.
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