> the goal is both a happy team and well functioning software.

software first. team second.

team happiness is important as a miserable team will hamper productivity and quality. but the team’s happiness is secondary to their overarching reason d’être — the software.

if there were no need for the software, the team wouldn’t need to exist. so that goal should take precedence.

YMMV

Yeah I see the same thing. Also shows up when people produce an “analysis” largely driven by AI and they haven’t really thought it through. They/we are outsourcing their thinking.

Check out AI-DLC or another structured development workflow for your team and stick to it. If you’ve got devs: not using any structured workflow, or using a variety (speckit, openspec, superpowers, their own) it’s going to be hard to control the quality of the development process itself and its outputs: you are just producing slop.

What many businesses are going through is the industrialization of software development.

It just sounds like accumulated tech debt? And the faster you ship new features, the faster it accumulates.

I think I definitely see the problem as a solo dev. I can just wing it with refactors and new tests, and all manners of sloshing about. But if I tried to do this with just one other person, they'd be pulling their hair out trying to understand why the last time they had to understand the code has completely shifted.

There definitely going to be a lot of fortune 500 companies absolutely wrecked by the amount of changes to their code base that no one will be "responsible" for because none of the workers will really know if it was their agent that changed something.

There could be some outliers who found the correct tools at the right time, but I don't think they'll suddenly be thrust into the money, because good code is definitely not the only thing that lets people succeed.

> The interesting part is that AI could do this, but managing developers with AI has become very difficult to get them to slow down and build stable simple things.

That is mutually incoherent. If AI can reliably do it, developers who reliably did it before AI would reliably did it again.

Sounds like AI cant reliably do it and your developers struggle to control its outputs.

Of course. You've described a company with no team.

What you've said also makes clear why nobody would have an incentive to play like a team player. You have this comprehension work you think is important and you've already devalued it by saying that humans would be a waste if AI could be used.

If I were a human working for you I would conclude that regardless of your exact words, your actions create the conditions whereby it is far safer to try to get the AI to bullshit its way through things than to risk trying to do them well as a human. You clearly articulate here that the bullshit is all you care for. If that is what will satisfy you most readily, why would anyone working for you aim higher anymore?

> I am currently in consideration for doing this

Try “I am considering”.

This is a leadership problem, not an AI problem. I have the opposite situation: I don't think about code "messiness" anymore. I trust my developers to ship the right thing because we communicate constantly about what our goal is and why we're doing it.

Solve the leadership problem and the AI thing becomes an advantage instead of a problem.

The original question was about developers going back to manually coding without using AI. The link you posted is not about it. IBM replaced its Human Resources team with AI and hired them back. They didn’t remove AI usage in development and went back to manual coding.

Please read your sources completely before posting them only reading the title

Ford did not. They hired back veterans to better train the AI.

> COO Kumar Galhotra said Ford had been over-relying on automated quality systems without getting results, per Bloomberg. The returning engineers rebuilt the data pipelines feeding Ford's AI training, mentored junior staff, and reprogrammed the automated systems they had originally been brought in to replace.

Similarly with Commonwealth Bank and IBM, which are cited in your second link. None of these companies are saying they're not going to use AI and they're going to go back to manual labor. What they are saying is that they laid off workers prematurely.

The big lesson is highlighted well by IBM's head of HR, which is you can use AI, but you have to continue to invest in humans:

> “If we don’t continue to invest in entry-level hires, what happens in three-five years?,” IBM’s chief human resources officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, said at a Charter AI Summit in New York. “There’s no pipeline; the well simply dries up,” LaMoreaux added.

> circular economy

I get what you mean, but in general circular economy means something different, positive in my opinion. Here is what wikipedia has to say:

> a model of resource production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products, to extend product life cycle for as long as possible

In the EU it is a hot topic for a lot of non-profit and social innovation work

Rehiring large numbers of people after AI-motivated layoffs is not the same as getting rid of LLM-generated code and going back to hand-written code as a whole.

No they didn’t. Did you read either of the things you posted?

What's your grade?

I think there are many companies that have not hopped on the AI bandwagon yet. This is why AI companies still see a huge potential for continued growth.

Some are hesitant to chase after the latest fad (fearing it will soon fade); others want the industry to shake out many of the flaws first.

We saw the same thing with the Internet. Many companies (including some really big ones) were slow to embrace it until everyone else was on board.

What a dream! Don't you have investors that need hyping up all the time?

Yeah I cant imagine my job without it anymore, in my hobby projects I dont really use it because its more about learning new stuff but for work I dont really care

It will happen once everything breaks and we have an entire generation of drooling idiots spamming prompts. AI is 100% trash and it will only get better at deceiving you into thinking it isnt.

Every single person I talk too that is enthusiastic about AI is so because they can't code for shit. Sure, then the AI seems better. But it never really is. Learn to code, that inertia you are talking about is the technical debt. It will drag you down into the abyss eventually

There is a big difference between intellisense and LLMs. I've never used intellisense to input something I wasn't already looking for/about to type out. It just saved me remembering the exact wording and/or keystrokes.

> Turns out the gains were eroded by having to check the work and turn verbose prose into an actual note.

LLMs are great at this. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't possible to improve the actionable notes.

Most human-made doctor notes I've seen have not been comprehensive, anyway, and the doctor has had to spend a good chunk of a rushed appointment scribbling notes rather than interacting with the patient.

Exactly. It fascinates me when I'm emailed long AI transcripts of meetings with the disclaimer "generated by AI. Be sure to check for accuracy".

Like, did somebody seriously think through the meaning and implication of that disclaimer and still write it?

> Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer

If you implement AI code review suggestions then you're using AI code, just the hard way.

Also I don't see why your clients would be ok with having AI review and influence your code. Seems hypocritical, or like you're trying to cheat them.

Out of curiosity - what space are are in?

I think that question hinges on the second part of your comment and should be answered as:

Does anyone know any company that went back to hand-written code because it decided drawbacks of ai generated code or some other concerns outweight the output benefits?

Lines-of-code has long been accepted as a terrible measure for code quality, and I believe it has been strongly correlated with poorer code quality.

It's so weird how "assuming" is like watching super man hold a train back from a little girl on the railroad tracks.

Shitting out lots of code faster was already possible before (just hire more interns who do it for free heh) the question is at what quality and is more code in less time really the biggest problem in professional software development that had to be solved?

LLMs can be very useful for all sorts of things, but large scale code generation is IMHO the least interesting use case. And even when LLMs are successfully used for code generation, I feel like progress has been reset to the early 60s and people are now rediscovering all the failed software development approaches (eg "spec-driven" is pretty much the equivalent of "waterfall", I'm now waiting for UML diagrams to make a comeback as the next big thing with an "agentic engineering" label slapped on ;)

Classic interactive "vibecoding" with quick turnaround times (but much quicker than now please, don't make me wait and let me slip out of the flow) might actually turn out to be the most useful way to build software with LLMs (or let's better say "prototypes"). Because everything else currently looks like we're building up too much bureaucracy around the software development process again, and just in time when we finally got rid of that shit (now we have that absurd amount of .md files in pseudo-human-language as "skills", "rules", "context", "memory", ...) like it was common in the 70s when the work was split between "software architects" who only do the high level design, and "implementers" who only bake that design into code. This was obviously a stupid idea and I don't know why the "AI bros" seem to be so keen on repeating that mistake.

Every approach that builds a "human language specification" that's separate from source code written in a much more precise programming language is doomed to fail (eg the code is the spec!), and that's nothing new, we've known this for decades, but that brain virus of "upfront software architecture" always keeps creeping back into the minds of people at the first opportunity.

I think most AI doomers will tell you that the quality of their code is better than LLM-generated code.

the number of companies using local AI for development is too small to draw any conclusions from.

tests generated by ai, especially which generates each time codex are completely useless and needed only for beautiful "44/44 tests passed"

I dunno, I have friends and family at Meta, Roblox, $JOB, etc that would all prefer a no-AI environment. It's definitely not a majority of devs, but it's not an insignificant amount either.

I disagree. Personally, I would work in company which respects more code/infra quality than coding speed. When you vibe-deliver a lot of features per sprint after some time codebase becomes an unpredictable AI Slop.

You absolutely can deny long term productivity gains.

Pre AI it took 100 engineers 5 years to get into a legacy code situation. Once you’re in a legacy code situation it’s very hard to add new features and your code is full of bugs. Fortunately most old companies with legacy code are making loads of money so they can pay the increased development costs to add features to their legacy code.

Now with AI five engineers can build a legacy codebase in six months.

Neither can anyone deny that 'productivity gains' are worthless if what's being produced is worthless.

I do. I deny the "gains". The "gains" will turn out to be a mirage in the medium to long term. The technical and cognitive debt incurred will be too extreme.

> Although code quality may sometimes suffer

That doesn't sound like a good thing in the long term.

> no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.

What are those "productivity gains"? Rapidly building hundreds of the wrong things that people do not want?

It means you cannot stop and the competition only moves far more quicker and its a forever race to the bottom.

Someone answered the question with some actual examples. Please refrain from the hyperbole

Those things don't hallucinate. (Of course, stackoverflow can be wrong but at least its peer reviewed)

The best part of the downvoting of this is the answer to all of these is yes. Companies have banned all of these in the past when they were coming up. If you don’t learn from the past, …