Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it’s a “cognitive amplifier,” claims Satya Nadella.
in other words please help us, use our AI
Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it’s a “cognitive amplifier,” claims Satya Nadella.
in other words please help us, use our AI
I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we’re all getting these messages from management that don’t give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.” We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.
It may be time for some malicious compliance.
Don’t reverse engineer anything. Do as your told and “just put this in” and deploy it. Everything will break and management will explode, but now you’ve demonstrated that they can’t just replace you with AI.
Now explain what you’ve been doing (reverse engineering to figure out their requirements), but that you’re not going to do that anymore. They need to either give you proper requirements so that you can write properly working code, or they give you AI slop and you’re just going to “put it in” without a second thought.
You’ll need your whole team on board for this to work, but what are they going to do, fire the whole team and replace them with AI? You’ll have already demonstrated that that’s not an option.
So in your case, not only is the LLM coding assistant not making you faster, it’s actively impeding your productivity and the productivity of your stakeholders. That sucks, and I’m sorry you’re having to put up with it.
I’m lucky that in my day job, we’re not (yet) forced to use LLMs, and the “AI coding platform” our upper management is trying to bring on as an option is turning out to be an embarrassing boondoggle that can’t even pass cybersecurity review. My hope is that the VP who signed off on it ends up shit-canned because it’s such a piece of garbage.