Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else

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.

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.