However, generative AI should be banned for leadership or product owners or anyone on the requirements specification end of the Jira ticket. I'm fine with them using LLMs to read documents and learn, but generative AI specifically in the hands of these folks seems to be a net productivity drag on organizations.

I am so tired of 1,500 word Jira tickets that are over-specified to death with requirements that nobody is actually interested in and I have to spend exorbitant amounts of times just trying to distill out the functionality that the requestor is actually looking for. And these logorrheic nightmare tickets end up spawning all kinds of other unnecessary downstream work.

And it has rolled out to the rest of the software engineering industry rapidly because a) it was adjacent to AI development, and b) software engineers are very expensive workers. Graphical design is also being hit due to its proximity to software engineering.

Other information workers are going to start feeling the hurt soon enough, but their respective industry timeline will be correlated with how much money it's going to save to replace them.

Paralegals, customer support, copywriters, data analysts, and any other fields that are purely informational are all going to feel the squeeze.

I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.

That people defend these antics is wild. It takes a special kind of sycophant to be lied to and to appreciate it; or I don't know, maybe it's just the regular kind.

I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.

My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.

It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.

I envy their optimism.

Bro, good engineering IS boring and it's supposed to be.

The whole reason that Software Engineering is not actually engineering is because the field is too young for there to be established, rigorous engineering codes that must be adhered to. Can you imagine if every bridge you went over or every elevator you rode in had been built with arbitrarily chosen technologies by uncertified "engineers" using the latest fad in engineering?

I think one of the outcomes of this great shift where most programming output is being produced by LLMs is that we're going to start seeing much more consistency across software implementations. It will be boring. And honestly that is probably going to be a good thing.

I mean, I guess I always knew the code I wrote was pretty derivative - a little Googling here, a little Stack Overflow there; but for it to only take 18 months or so for the machines to take 90% of my job was a real eye opener.

Just feed it the API docs and loop.

That particular use case can go from hardly any traffic at all to a hurricane of traffic during something like, well, a hurricane.

For consistent processing loads, I think I could save money by just running on dedicated EC2 instances, but you cannot beat the instant scale of Lambdas.

Shameless plug: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.radarlove....

I don't expect any of us will live long enough to see a similar skid-mark on the underwear of humanity.

But yes, if a system fails to prioritize its continued existence, it doesn't matter what else it accomplishes, it will cease to exist as that system.