Layoffs have been a defining feature of the job market in 2025, with several major companies announcing thousands of job cuts driven by artificial intelligence.
In fact, AI was responsible for almost 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. this year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
I did replace a bunch of tasks with “AI” this year, but none of those tasks are worth a full employee. They do save time so our employees can get more done.
Execs want me to build more AI tools, but frankly I’ve built all the ones which can be made reliable.
I pretty much use LLMs to manage jira for me.
Someone I work with uses the jira LLM to make the worst tickets I’ve ever seen though. They’re massive.
I write Jira tickets with what needs to be achieved and why, and usually my preferred method of doing it and if there’s any constraints. I usually don’t much care exactly how it’s done, as long as it works, but sometimes it needs to fit into the bigger picture in a way that might not be obvious. My team have different strengths, and I’m more than happy for them to do what they do best. Most of my tickets range from two to six sentences in length - some are longer if it’s complicated, but most things aren’t.
My managers don’t think that’s enough for a ticket, and have been using LLMs to boost them up to several pages. That obviously requires making up tonnes of shit and overspecifying shit that doesn’t need specifying. We have to waste time verifying that we’ve not now got requirements that make no sense, and now have pages of test notes of things that don’t need testing, which means tickets now take days rather than hours to complete.
No-one can read these multi-page monstrosities, and are using LLMs to compact them down to a few sentences again.
I can’t believe that we’re boiling the oceans for this shit.
Yeah, this is annoying. My Jira tickets are usually as long as “Implement new email notification system. Make sure opt-out is respected”, I set a due date, assign myself, and move it to the active state. Once I’ve started work I post the PR.
If it doesn’t fit on a sticky note then the task or documentation is misspecified.
I’ve been asked by my manager to come up with a goal for next year on how to augment my job with GenAI.
Why not combine two hatreds at once - GenAI and Jira. Thanks for the idea!