typical attitude of the still employed, nonproductive caste

Outside of AI this has been the situation for the federal government for the last 18 months or so.

My little org lost 70% of the senior people in the purges

The way I put it is this: making a thing work the first time is easy. Juniors and AI can both do that. Try figuring out why a thing quit working three years later. AI fails miserably, junior devs just start crying, and the senior devs who took the buyout laugh in your face and order another mojito.

the efficiency gains from AI are real

Citation needed.

I'm an experienced solo developer who tried embracing the state of the art in agentic programming on a several month long non-trivial project. My income depends on this project succeeding so I'm not fucking around here looking for an excuse for ai to fail. I'm trying to keep up...

My idea is that if this works, I want it working for me.

The results were unimpressive at best. It feels very fast at first but the entropy is insidious and comes even faster.

When you hit the wall where the agent stops being able to understand it's own work and contextualise tasks in a meaningful way, you're left with a pile of incomprehensible shit that kind of looks like code.

You will have nothing. Nothing but a giant token bill, wasted time and a sense of shame.

The idea of summing up "years of experience" between multiples of people always feels like one of those "lies, damn lies, and statistics" type of statistics.

Like brain drain is a real thing and they are still making an important point but "200 years of experience, maybe even more!" doesn't really feel like it means anything concrete for an argument.

Fuck, I am commenting on one of those mindless images of text with absolutely zero information on it. Why am I engaging with this? This is worthless.

"The efficiency gains are real!"

AI is the shortcut to what looks like knowledge to people who are clueless. Hence the massive CEO tripling down on it being the big thing. This bubble gon' pop and it'll leave quite the nasty mess. Now what to short first and when is the question

The irony of using AI to write that lol

The efficiency gains depend on your metric. You have a shitty one, and you gamed it, intentionally. Congratulations?

Ah, voluntoldment. We just had a big round at my workplace, but at least no one only a couple people up the chain are engaging with the autofellatory fiction that AI will pick up the slack. Even still, they canned the hypercompetent plant engineer that everyone liked, so half his team left and a couple of our projects are dead in the water because of it. /vent

edit: chemical manufacturing, not software

You have a job because you are young and not expensive. All the old timers with experience have had 20-30 years of pay raises. AI is just some bullshit excuse to get rid of the high earners. It happens all the time, the excuse just chances every decade. It will happen to you, I guarantee it.

Who does it serve and for what? Welcome to the new dark ages.

Voluntary retirement/resignation sounds like it could only ever be a bad idea, even financially.

The people who choose to leave are the ones who know they'll land on their feet and find another place. ie: competent, experienced, in-demand. Possibly being head-hunted.

The ones you can't easily bribe to leave are the ones that don't expect to find alternative employment in a reasonable time frame (or rate). So... inexperienced, under qualified, or low production.

Yeah! This is AI's fault! Inserting itself into our lives.

It's a big difference when a company use AI as tool for the employees to improve the quality and productivity, or use the AI to substitute with an AI experimented employees to save costs. It's not the same a student which use eg. the Sketchapediaº to understand better a complex theme in the research for his essay or simply use a Chatbot to write the essay for him. A designer or artist using an AI in graphical editors for routine tasks or adding some effects to his work, o simply writing a small promt in an AI to create yhe design or artwork. Absolute not needed a Smart Home, Fridge or Toaster with AI to spy on us, to create memes or worse, political influencers using Deep Fakes Research centers, pharmacompanies, medical centers, had made big advances in new medications, treatments in diseases before not curable, new materials, better designs, improved research in physics, astronomy, with results impssibles without AI, researches in days which in traditional manner would have need years.

But this, the AI as tool in the hand of experimented employees and scientists. This is the problem, not really the AI as such, but greedy companies abusing and biasing it, to control, manipulate and scam the users

º

Process knowledge vs. bosses

They have a point, but this is clearly an AI-generated output. The irony is not lost on me...

Also there's the amount of tokens being blown through at breakneck speed. There's zero path to profitability.

Well, now they all have part time jobs training AI, so now we're just harvesting information without knowledge of experience.