One of my first gigs as a consultant was to write a project management system for a company that didn't really need a custom project management system. The CEO pulled me aside and told me the only important feature of the project management system was that you couldn't assign the same priority to two features. I would be blamed for making such a crappy project management system, but that's what I was there for. Once I was done, I was told to make myself hard to schedule and expensive.

> It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.

My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".

Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.

* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.

It’s a hard balance but in an ideal scenario there would be a good balance of tension between engineering and management/product decision makers. On one hand engineers generally will iterate for far too long and on the other product decision makers will want to birth new features daily.

Management is just responding to idiot end-users. I have been on plenty of sales calls where customers ask if features X,Y,Z are available, knowing that there’s a 99% chance they’ll never need them, but they ask anyway just because they’ve heard that someone else used a feature like that at some point in the past. If it’s not, they just assume the software is inferior.

> ...management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks.

+1. Straight into my quotes file.

Most of the time customers buy the thing with the shiniest marketing, and shininess of marketing depends upon features in relation to the competition.

Say more about the one exception you know of?

While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.

Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.

Please, I am much more interested about that _one_ company. Can you talk more about it ?

> making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks

I would give you +100 for that if I could.

Very well-played (and worded). I think I'm going to steal that one.

"decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks."

And yet - they are the one's paying you and everyone else somehow?

I think you might be missing something fundamental, start by considering that what is 'good software' is not an intrinsic measure, but a measure of what it does.

The only reason we really need 'intrinsically good' software, is if it's very long lived and a ton of people are going to come to depend on it.

People trying to make oak furniture when in most cases what we want is IKEA.

That said - AI or no AI - there's no excuse for not keeping a grip on things, whatever kind of 'grip' that might be.

To be the devil's advocate, engineers themselves can be hilariously incompetent too. Engineers have a tendency of assuming that budget is infinite and target audience is other engineers from same specialization. Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account. At some point my manager, who himself used to be an engineer, told me with straight face to convince the rest of the engineering department to drop everything and join his newest pet project despite zero potential of any business outcomes.

That school of thought echoes today in statements like (paraphrasing) "you may like home office more, and I may not have any hard evidence that working from the office is better, but trust me, it improves collaboration, even if the people you work with aren't in the same office!"

This way of thinking is absolutely still around. I think AI may actually be making it worse. Now managers have it to validate their ideas and they don't think they have to listen to feedback from subordinates because some AI agrees with them.

So your position is that people actually want to do more work, but their managers are forcing them to work less? I don't buy it.

Something like the time value of money. But on the other hand, a bad answer can have negative value. Although "wrong and early" is better than "wrong and late".

Yeah, we live finite lives. Time is the one thing the vast majority of us aren’t getting more of. Of course speed is a priority. This isn’t a “capital” thing, it’s a fundamental part of the human experience.

Depends what the cost of failure is.

If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue.

If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.

Yes, but a grand prize result being awarded to an AI slop submission is not it. It deteriorates the legitimacy of the whole contest if all that matters is convincing an AI rather than critical reviewers.

What if the slop PRs come from your super?

Customers are customers because of capital.

Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.

> grant-funded

Capital.

First, I don’t pretend that’s the only driver.

Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation.

Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation.

Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capitalism that wants infinite growth immediately.

i meant "passing glance" at the _very very least_ where anything > 0 is so much better than 0. I have people just blindly offloading pretty important analysis to LLM without any review whatsoever and it's super annoying and counter productive resulting in a lot of rework. I've covered refinement with developers trying to meet AC that make no sense. Many times i've just deleted parts of AC (which is a no-no where i live) and flat out told developers "this is bullshit and makes no sense, i'm deleting it."

Same goes for meeting recaps, i get a lot of LLM generated recaps from conference calls. If the meeting organizer just looks at it before sending it out then they'll instinctively edit/fix things a bit to make the recap more concise and accurate. I wish they'd just look at it before sending it.

In case anyone is curious about it:

Submission: https://devpost.com/software/netra-empowering-the-visually-i...

Discussion: https://gemini3.devpost.com/forum_topics/43663-winners-rant

IMO that’s awesome. I like when folks are clever. Just modify the rules next go around.

It’s a contest judged by and LLM. Not sure why we would take it that serious.

Should have said Gemini 1 Hackathon, pesky hallucinations.

No... no it doesn't.

I don't think it has much to do with tweets, but the flag planting is correct. You have to timestamp your idea because otherwise if you're too slow, the community doesn't much care about "pretty much same idea but now done properly and thoroughly" and will just elevate the faster one.

A lot of philosophy starts from the fundamental observation that, to solve a problem, you could either solve a problem, or state that the problem is ill-posed in some way (and dissolve it). Either answer the question, or question the question.

It's not a new problem in some sense. If you've dealt with really smart but really arrogant friends, they might jump ahead 10 steps and assume your rebuttal, posit theirs, assume your rebuttal to their posit, etc. etc. without... actually taking the time to listen carefully. On the national scale, this looks like forced trust in government authorities about what is "objectively best".

People need to get it through their skulls that, even if an AI, or any intelligence, could even solve the damn Riemann Hypothesis: if it's wrong, it's wrong. Of course, I think all of us know the objection - we see it on hackernews all the time. "You guys are just stupid contrarians who can't understand AI's deep reasoning". OK. The second inference? "therefore you are unable to govern yourselves properly - your concerns are all fallacies, misunderstandings, bad for you, etc.".

You might think that the second inference is extreme and nobody actually believes that, but as always, it's a gradient. Before AI, you might've had an extremely strong sense of self. Now? You look at OpenAI solving open math problems left and right on a public foundation model, and you think, "Maybe I should just trust it more. If I spend cycles thinking, it's probably going to outdo me anyways." The AI model silently makes 5 different assumptions and transformations? "Well, maybe it was rational in the space of tradeoffs to do that. The AI knows best, after all". You might be thinking of an architecture with 5 different key constraints based on lived experience, in which the AI keeps misunderstanding. "Oh, well, this genius-level mathematician/programmer AI isn't understanding my words - surely I must be mistaken, right? It's only humble to think that way".

I can't convince people otherwise though. After all, I can't "prove" that you should have a backbone when talking to AI. it could just as easily be "you're arrogant, this machine is in the top of all academic fields and is coming for all white collar jobs, who's to say you're right about anything?" All I can say is, there's a reason why Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad

This is one of the things that upsets me the most about LLM writing. “Load bearing” and “belt and suspenders” are two tropes I’ve used for a long, long time and now I have to be intentional about not using them lest I be accused of offloading my writing.

Belt and braces please Claude, I'm British.

Honestly? It’s the shape that makes it clearly AI. That’s the quiet admission at the heart of the problem.

The true AI exponential.

What do you think my two long posts in the discussion forum of kaggle are? I am the author and the evidence I present very much justified the original title.

your title was rewritten by AI, correct? :)

the slop doesn't bother me as much as the bowdlerized nature of said slop (and search results). sure, there was a lot of slop after the Lapsing of the Press Act (1695), but it was human slop with convictions and syphilis!

It’s true by virtue of any place relying on such tools having a high likelihood of turning into a horrible workplace due to the resulting hires.

Yes, let's fund some more trillions for that instead of curing cancer or making extremely effective solar panels or curing alzheimer and artherosclerosis.

We could have spent these 10 trillion on so many better things.

Human. They call it "my human"

This is a staggeringly banal comment.

> AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.

You forgot CHEAPER (at least now, burning VC money), which is a major motivating factor.

That just isn’t true.

AI is capable of performing a lot of grunt work reliably. Still must be reviewed. But a big productivity gain over doing everything yourself.

On the long arc is a better world: post-scarcity, accelerated advancement in important fields (such as medicine), and just general improvement in lifestyle for the greater global population. The primary scare is that the higher capabilities will be restricted to some small subset as most resources currently are today, but the increasing release of open models is helping to counteract that possibility.

Yes, if the Cro-Magnons had guns they’d say “wow, hunting meat is WAY easier” and then experience massive-scale death in the future. But that kinda happened anyway in various places, just using much more primitive tools. Humans gonna human.

> AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands

You have to spell this out a lot more if you want to have credibility.

I’m not seeing anything in discussed here that seems scary.

I've been on the up, and the down, the lull and the acceptance. AI as it stands today will bring destruction to the world we knew. However, that doesn't mean the end of the world. Rather a new beginning, and we get to shape what that might look like. Sadly, all signs point to medieval times and digital feudalism but at least we have history to fall back on. Until such time occurs, AI will continue to bring value to companies just perhaps not in the ways they expected. There's no "replace my business with a workflow" silver bullet and I think that's what was sold to them. The reality is closer to the ground. 65% usefulness is a pretty accurate score for me.

> force multiplayer

So a kind of Star Wars game?

For several years one of the most widely used LLM coding benchmarks - SWE-bench Verified - consisted mainly of PRs from the Django project!

These are great questions