At which point you've gained very little efficiency in most large organizations given that by the time you're actually doing development work at the ticket level 90% of the project timeline (identifying issues, prioritizing, creating requirements, architecture, ticket breakdowns, coordination, etc) has already passed.

If AI can enable engineers to move through the organization more effectively, say by allowing them to work through the service mesh as a whole, that could reduce time. But in order to evaluate code contributions to any space well, as far as I can tell, you still have to put in leg work even if you are an experienced engineer and write some features which exposes you to the libraries, quirks, logging/monitoring, language, etc that make up that specific codebase. (And also to build trust with the people who own that codebase and will be gatekeeping your changes, unless you prefer the Amazon method of having junior engineers YOLO changes onto production codebases without review apparently... holy moly, how did they get to that point in the first place...)

So the gains seem marginal at best in large organizations. I've seen some small organizations move quicker with it, they have less overhead, less complexity, and smaller tasks. Although I've yet to see much besides very small projects/POCs/MVPs from anyone non-technical.

Maybe it'll get to the point where it can handle more complexity, I kind of think we're leveling off on this particular phase of AI, and some headlines seem to confirm that...

- MS starting to make CoPilot a bit less prominent in its products and marketing - Sora shutting down - Lots of murky, weird, circular deals to fund a money pit with no profits - Observations at work

It's really kind of crazy how much our entire society can be hijacked by these hype machines. My company did slow roll AI deployment a bit, but it very much feels like the Wild West, and the amount of money spent! I'm sure it's astronomical. Pretty sure we could have hired contractors to create the Chrome plugin and Kafka topic dashboard we've deployed for far cheaper

The productivity gains are somewhat real in a sense, but are not really about "moving faster", as the hype would have us believe. GenAI agentic systems instead boost individual developer "efficiency" by allowing a single, reasonably qualified developer, to approximate an entire software team. As those developers, however, we're still required to manage the workload of those teams and ourselves to ensure quality output, just as ever before.

The problem is that it's VERY easy to overload oneself with the output of these new tools. Human comprehension is the bottleneck, as much as it always has been. Anyone that tells you otherwise is shilling for these companies.

And just to underscore my point about the disconnect between the advertising/hype vs the reality: the real point of this tech and the reason leadership seems so motivated to push it is that they ultimately see this tooling as our replacement, not our enhancement, at least in the long term (although those "many hats" roles will have to persist).

It's just harder to sell trades folk the tools of their demise, so it's couched in terms of a miracle product that'll make us all 10x devs; when the reality is, it'll just be 1/10 of us still around doing the risk mitigation work left within the system that relaced us.

The big AI projects I've seen at work are...

- A Kafka topic visualization dashboard

and

- A chrome extension the original "developer" can no longer work on cause the bots will wreck something else on every new feature he tries to add or bug he tries to fix

I think we're a ways out from truly complex code bases that only agents understand.

I've seen a bunch of hype video where people spend lord knows how much money in order to have a bunch of these things run around and I guess... use Facebook, and make reports to distribute amongst themselves, and then the human comes in and spends all their time tweaking this system. And then apparently one day it's going to produce _something_ but two years and counting and much like bitcoin, I've yet to see much of this _something_ materialize in the form of actual, working, quality software that I want to use.

My buddy made a thing that tells him how many people are at the gym by scraping their API and pushing it into a small app package... I guess that's kind of nice.

Does not apply to the White House

The gold Donald Trump pin is just part of our culture

Like hanging his face on banners at the DOJ while proclaiming he'd be entitled to a third term?

No, it comes after the mass rallies and deportations of opponents. This can get an awful lot worse.

What? Lol, they've been doing that the entire time. They're very open about the playbook lol.

Bow down, or get harassed, sued, investigated, fined, etc.

But if everyone acted like Stallman then solutions that have gone away such as public payphones would come back due to their requirement.

He doesn't give a crap if a random phone record of his appears in a random haystack, and that's kind of the point isn't it? It's the aggregated, crawlable stores that are the threat

There may be other issues with Stallman, but that behavior doesn't strike me as particularly inconsistent

Really? I'd think a human being would be more likely to recognize they'd crossed a boundary with another human, step back, and address the issue with some reflection?

If apologizing is more likely the response of an AI agent than a human that's either... somewhat hopeful in one sense, and supremely disappointing in another.

A human is obviously capable of a turn around. I just won't expect it to happen right after. Of course, it's not like that couldn't happen either.

> I'd think a human being would be more likely to recognize they'd crossed a boundary with another human

Please. We're autistic software engineers here, we totally don't do stuff like "recognize they'd crossed a boundary".

I guess you could have two people per presentation, one person who confirms whether to slide in the generated slide or maybe regenerate. And then of course, eventually that's just an agent