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 predicted they could fleece a bunch of investors and politicians before it became apparent to everyone else

Billionaires, that’s the malfunction, time to dine yet?

maybe when red state gasoline hits 7.50

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

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

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.

No one tells them no

They’re all conservatives. Conservatives are profoundly unintelligent by nature. Just the dumbest cockroaches to ever infest a planet.

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.

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.

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 are still making money hand over foot and they’ve doubled down on it. I smell bubble getting larger before pop.

Along similar lines, I’ve started calling it “copyslop” when someone dumps ai garbage into my comms.

Great sites and a new term I recently learned about:

• dontpastetheai.com
• meatproxy.me

They’re acting as a “meat proxy”.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sources: cbc.ca/…/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-give-more-v…

moneywise.com/…/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-pensioners…

Well, considering I paid more in income tax than Bezos did, I think that’s a pretty damn good idea

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.

The “purpose” for AI (the reason it is being FORCED on us) is that it allows “wealth” to access “skill” while at the same time keeping skilled people away from wealth.

NOW what billionaire would not want that?

What poor person would want that?

See the problem yet?

Defenestrate Mark

That doesn’t work, Mark flies.

This currently only works for poor people because access to skill is free right now… and we see it not working for billionaires once the financial bubble around LLMs bursts.

Not that billionaires will suddenly be poor, but someone will be holding the bag eventually. We see efforts right now that the government/taxpayers will be the ones via bailouts. This is of course unacceptable but the patriotism argument that the West needs to outcompete China may work for some.

This currently only works for poor people

The first taste is FREE. That’s how they get you hooked.

Not a fan of the guy but I’m stealing “slop grenade.”

dw he stole much more

I’m not a fan of a lot of his politics but I honestly thought that interview was worth listening to. He has some interesting nuanced takes.

Great, can we now abort this asinine “AI” bullshit and go back to normal GPU prices?

No, we’re going to continue on this path until we have to suck the liquids out of your body to cool the data center

Wasn’t Shopify one of the first companies to go all in on an AI infrastructure? I seemed to recall reading that about a year or two ago.

Yep. Same guy said managers will ask why they can’t use AI for that job. It seems that he has answered that hypothetical question here.

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.

I prefer the term “Meat Proxy”, but I get that it’s more of an ad hominem. I use both terms.

Has anyone noticed that when a teammate uses AI, their teammates also have to as well? Honestly it might be because they don’t want to bother reading the machine’s code when the original author didn’t put much thought into it. Another might be the mental fatigue from reading code that grows faster than you can parse.

He raises exactly that point in the interview when talking about slop grenades.

Ok then why did you give money to your friend DHH for Omarchy? it’s literally a slop vibe coded “distro”.

Because of the complete vibe coding of Omarchy it takes longer the configure it than any other distro with a WM. I mean hell the AI cut the Hyperland config up into 6 damn LUA files AND THEN you have to unbind everything and rebind it as opposed to ONE file that you can literally just swap out binds. And yet you gave the guy a couple million for it.

So I’m so sorry Tobias but you did this to yourself. you were one of the first to embrace AI completely and use it completely wrong and now you’re whining about it and you continue to fund it. you can’t have it both ways bud.

“SHIP MORE CODE!!! NO NOT LIKE THAT!!!” - CEOs

More lines = better

max-line-width: 20

gotta get them klocs boiiiiii

This is happening everywhere. My job is about 2 months behind schedule at the moment and theyre still pushing for AI solutions

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

how else is ai slop going to be monetized? more slop more hallucinations more bubble.

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.

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.

Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?

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.

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: …

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?

We need to stop replacing software devs with LLMs and instead replace managment with LLMs!

Couldn’t be any worse

Yeah, you shouldn’t blame AI. You should directly blame the person who implemented the LLM system used.

“AI didn’t realise meeting requirements was important”

“John implemented a system which routinely misses requirements and has wasted 50 hours of work which could have been easily avoided with the previous system”

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.

You asked for it, you got it.

“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.

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.

In my experience in a way it was better, because they had very low volume of output. Yes, pretty bad already but the GenaAI turned to their volume to 11.

This is one of the biggest downside, the worst people get the most volume out of it because they don’t know or carevto curate the output.

Looking at my last job before I left when AI was being pushed heavily I think I can see what you mean actually.

Before the incompetents would look at something and pass it on to second line without thinking. Now they copy paste the idiot AI outputs. It makes their stats look way better, wastes customer time much more and doesn’t help when it finally gets to me after 2 weeks of bullshit.

Customer satisfaction would be higher if you didn’t use it and did nothing. You are a net drain to the company now because you are trying to do things you don’t understand because of blind reliance on LLMs.

Heh, reminds me of an email thread. Someone stated a fairly straightforward, clear, and actionable course of action.

Then someone followed up with a GenAI email basically trying to be a sycophant to the person who wrote the plan and agreeing with them.

A VP did not get excited by the person that actually plainly declared what to do, but did announce that he was going to set up a meeting with the sycophant because he displayed so much insight, despite only repeating the first guy in a more confusing and buzzwordy way.

The AI generates corpo-speak in a very exciting way that further exacerbates an existing problem of promoting the wrong people.

You shouldn’t expect AI to generate a finished work product yet. If you’re forcing employees to use it, teach them to used it as a starting point and then put their own personal touch on it.

If you’re making a deck, have AI generate the bones, you add the details, then polish it up with AI if you want it to look fancy. If you expect it to turn a bunch of docs into a presentation only using prompts, you’re going to have a bad time.

Or, or - now hear me out - ban the use of AI to do a job that requires a human thought process.

Dude you’re getting paid to not have to use your brain. I finish my work in an hour and spend the rest of the day doing a bunch of corporate culture BS that gives you visibility to the bosses that actually decide your pay. Put effort where you get the most return. Hang out with your friends in the cafeteria and talk about WoW. Tell your boss you are in a mentor circle and slap that on your quarterly review.

Now I think I’m the problem. Great.

Other than chatting with friends, that sounds like a nightmare. I’d rather be just doing the job that I enjoy and doing it well.

Yeah bc that worked for the Amish Empire.

Weird comment considering the Amish are still around and, if anything, get proven right every day (except for the sexism and racism)

Get proven right about what? Plenty of Amish sects explicitly use technology if it’s in the course of their work or business. They use power tools for furniture making, have computers to handle payments, cell phones, trucks, etc.

They just don’t use it in their personal lives.

Correct, glad you agree.

Aw, now kith

Name something that doesn’t

The problem in my experience isn’t as much the work forcing it, it is the people who are very enthusiastic because they didn’t know what to do and now they think the AI does it for them, but they still have bad ideas.

Think of the person who has this “great app idea” but just needs a developer to write it. Well now these messes are having GenAI churn out… something. They don’t know if it works or not, but now all they need is someone to help finish off the “essentially done” work, or to accept the pull request the AI generated for your project.

Similar story for the creative content like videos and text. These people were limited by not having enough care to bother to learn or invest the time, but they thought they had amazing ideas. Now we see their uninspired slop bright to life in painful time killing form. The ones that might use it as just an accelerator but care about the output are drowned out by the “prompt and it’s done” folks that just don’t care.

The same thing has been happening in music production for the last few decades.

Its gotten easier and easier to make music, so the market is flooded and the average quality is lower.

But at the same time I would say there is also more music in the good tiers than there used to be. Certainly the variety has exploded.

What id say is that in neither case is it really a problem if its in an ecosystem that already has some form of rating system.

Shit apps existed before AI, and they fell into oblivion with 1 star ratings. The same will continue to apply moving forward.

They are hyping themselves. So is Fortune.

We all told you it was vaporware and you wanted to ride that bubble. Don’t pretend any of this was a surprise.

slow clap