As always, I use the term “AI” loosely. I’m referring to these scary LLMs coming for our jobs.
It’s important to state that I find LLMs to be helpful in very specific use cases, but overall, this is clearly a bubble, and the promises of advance have not appeared despite hundreds of billions of VC thrown at the industry.
So as not to go full-on polemic, we’ll skip the knock-on effects in terms of power-grid and water stresses.
No, what I want to talk about is the idea of software in its current form needing to be as competent as the user.
Simply put: How many of your coworkers have been right 100% of the time over the course of your career? If N>0, say “Hi” to Jesus for me.
I started working in high school, as most of us do, and a 60% success rate was considered fine. At the professional level, I’ve seen even lower with tenure, given how much things turn to internal politics past a certain level.
So what these companies are offering is not parity with senior staff (Ph.D.-level, my ass), but rather the new blood who hasn’t had that one fuckup that doesn’t leave their mind for weeks.
That crucible is important.
These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.
We are, after all, at this point, the “good enough” country. LLM marketing is on brand.
You must log in or # to comment.
These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.
This seems like it pretty much sums things up from my experience.
We’re encouraged (coughrequiredcough) to use LLMs at work. So I tried.
There are things they can do. Sometimes. But you know what they can’t do? Be liable for a fuck up.
When I ask a coworker a question, if they confidently answer wrong, they fucked up, not me. When I ask a LLM? The LLM isn’t liable, it’s me for not verifying it. If I’m verifying anyway, why am I using the LLM?
They fuck up often enough that I can’t put my credibility on the line over speedy slop. People at work consider me to be a good programmer (don’t ask me how, I guess the bar is low lol). Imagine if my code was just whatever an LLM shat out. It’d be the same exact quality as all of my other coworkers who use whatever their LLM shat out. No difference in quality.
And we would all be liable when the LLMs fucked up. We would learn something. We would, not the LLM. And the LLM will make the same exact fuck up the next time.
I’m reminded of when I started a team, and once assembled, I told them bluntly: “I don’t care how often you fuck up, so long as it’s a different fuckup each time.”
There’s a good commentary about that in here:
AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers
“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”
“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”
This is something often overlooked. You think you don’t need to develop staff so that your company, like, continues? OK, have fun with that.
I never thought I’d say this about an Amazon exec, but this guy seems to actually be based in reality.
My biggest frustration with “AI” is that we’re pretending automation is new. I don’t mean going back to the Industrial Revolution, but that’s been the whole point of code since its inception. Other than having faster pipes to vacuum up everything, this is very much linear.
Thing is, we used to know what the code actually did. These are snake-oil salesmen.
Least expensive employees? Does he mean salary wise? I was always under the impression software devs were paid well
An acquaintance at work (in Australia) went to work as a developer for Amazon in the US a few years back. According to him, the hours he was expected to work meant that his really great salary actually translated to a quite shitty hourly rate. And he never got to go sightseeing and tourist-ing with his wife and kids because he was always working.
My friend and her husband also worked in the US for years, in mining, and said similar things. Terrible leave offerings, and a culture where even if you have leave you feel extreme pressure not to take it.
I just implemented an LLM in a vacation request process precisely because the employees are stupid as fuck.
We were getting like 10% of requests coming in with the wrong number of hours requested because people can’t fucking count properly, or understand that you do not need to use vacation hours for statutory holidays. This is despite the form having a calculator and also showing in bright red any stat holidays inside the dates of the request.
Now the LLM checks if the dates, hours, and note from the employee add up to something reasonable. If not it goes to a human to review. We just had a human reviewing every single request before this, because it was causing so many issues, an hour or two each week.
Why would you use an LLM for this? This sounds like a process easily handled by conventional logic, which would be cheaper, faster, and actually reliable… (The ‘notes’ part notwithstanding I guess, but calculations in general are definitely not a good use of an LLM)
Normally I’d agree, and we used some of that in the original form (like maximum hours, checking for negative submissions, etc.) but requests don’t always follow simple logic and more complex logic just led to failures every time a user did something other than take a standard full day off.
Some employees work 7 hours, while others are 7.5, some have flex days and hours that change that, sometimes requests are only for part days, sometimes they may use multiple leave types to cover one off period.
I spent a few hours writing and testing the prompt against previous submissions to fine tune it.
So far it’s detected every submission error in the two weeks it’s been running, with only one false positive.
If it helps to accurately fill in the details correctly in the backend system, which are then properly validated or escalated for human review/intervention (and let the human requester choose the escalation path too, as opposed to blindly submitting), then it sounds great.
Guided experiences, leading to the desired outcome, with less need for confused humans to talk to confused humans.
I want the same for most financial approvals in my company. Finance folks speak a different language to most employees, but they have an oversized impact on defining business processes, slowing down innovation, frustrating employees, and often driving costs UP.
This is absolutely one of the cases I think it’s suited for. The key is the human at the end.
No. Not really anyways.
HOWEVER… The AIs in question MUST BE Competent Enough. What your definition of that will be is likely to be flexible and possibly even debatable with others depending on the situation.
What needs to be true is that AI must not be capable of making the same mistakes a human could, but the mistakes that an AI COULD POSSIBLY MAKE are required to be mistakes that any human could reasonably and very easily catch.
Unfortunately the above IS NOT TRUE of current AI LLM type implementations. These LLMs have no consciousness nor ability to reason beyond what a computer could. They have no creativity, despite having the ability to parse language and guess the next word.
If you only learned the rules, grammar and vocabulary of a specific language and were given absolutely zero context or cultural and historical teaching; an LLM is what that would look like. This by itself is not enough to replace jobs.
Is that fact enough to stop heartless corporations from trying it? Hell. The. Fuck. No. They will try it anyways, they will ‘fuck around and find out’ on the off chance that it may save them money. They don’t care that it’s the company selling the ‘AI product’'s job to lie to sell their product. The fact that some companies are that desperate to save cash is telling in and of itself about the state of the world right now…but that’s another topic for another day and another threaded post in another subcommunity on Beehaw.
I mean none of it is about how smart. It’s all about money. So the ai is good enough if it makes money
Making money? That’s the laugh I needed tonight. They’re all bleeding money, as in all bubbles.
deleted by creator
