AI use at my company is now mandatory. We all have gotten really expensive Claude of ChatGPT licenses and (apparently) it’s being monitored whether we actually use them. For while I’ve resisted, telling everyone I don’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole. Now I just write the occasional non-invasive prompt (“check for spelling errors in the comments” or "format the buffer so that all lines have less than 80 columns) just so someone can report to the c-suite that our department is using AI.
Meanwhile I have to do code reviews on patches that have been actually written by a chatbot and doing that takes sometimes as long as writing the whole fucking code from scratch.
But hey, style guidelines are out the window too because the slop machine can’t follow them consistently anyway and apparently fixing that shit manually is too much to ask. So at least I never have to fight anyone again over indentation and braces.
Find out who made it mandatory, then CC them on every error the bot makes ever
Bonus points if it make an “agentic” LLM 8 ball do the forwarding for you
Meanwhile I have to do code reviews on patches that have been actually written by a chatbot and doing that takes sometimes as long as writing the whole fucking code from scratch.
Yeah I’ve had to do this too. It’s lovely isn’t it? You do all the work and someone else who half-assed a prompt and sent out a change without even reading it gets most of the credit.
The US is going to spend itself into bankruptcy building all those “Clean Coal” and “Green Friendly Gas” plants to power what’s essentially humanity’s biggest digital dumbass because incompetent buzzword tech managers can’t stop generating so much demand for it.
New reality at work: Pretending to use AI while having to clean up after all the people who actually do.
I’ve had some fun with AI image generation. And rephrasing text to make it as if it was written by a WH40K Ork is hilarious.
Any real use case for AI I have yet to find. All code it writes is extremely convoluted if it even runs at all. Much more than my own and I’m not even a real programmer.
My manager thankfully doesn’t require me to use it but the higher ups are really enthusiastic about AI for some reason.
The only time I have used it is for poorly-documented libraries as a step before “just try to read through all the source code” by asking it to create an example using some function or usecase. I’ve had to do that maybe twice ever. It might be useful in PRs, as some others in our company keep adding copilot as a reviewer, but I’ve seen it make some dumb mistakes but also find some things others missed.
As for having it write actual code, I rejected a PR for having unmaintainable code. The person, who didn’t normally work in the language in question, had used AI to generate it.
My biggest concern with AI is that some of the use cases are there. There are non-developers creating full projects that work (at least on the surface) but there’s no review of code, no way to know how it actually works and whether it’s scalable.
My worry isn’t necessarily that I’m out of a job. It’s the short term “we don’t need developers now so we can get rid of them and hire them back later at lower pay”
Yup, the common concern that I’ve heard is “AI functions as a dipshit jr dev, so we’ve fired all the jr devs, and sr devs who do the cleanup are now much more valuable. In 20 years, either AI will be at sr dev level and doing everything, or we will be out of devs because we fired all the entry level ones and the existing ones have aged out.”
as someone who does this, i just keep my mouth shut. i smile and attend all of the AI meetings and its assumed i use all of the AI slop that my employer has made abundantly clear that ut is extremely expensive and to tell them if i dont use it.
i guess i do use it after all. having my boss assume i use it because its available to me and its expensive is usage, just not direct usage.
I hate that I’m in a position where I have to monitor people’s adoption of AI at work. I’d much rather they not use if they don’t feel a need
Depending on how AI-pilled your boss is, maybe you could just “ask the AI” if it is being used. If the magic eight ball says “yes”, then it’s being used, and everybody should be happy.
Mmmmm. My favorite compliance: malicious.
