AI-Generated “workslop” Is Destroying Productivity?

> AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating

It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to quit).

Once GPS became ubiquitous, I started relying on it, and over about a decade, my navigational skills degraded to the point of embarrassment. I've lived in the same major city now for 5 years and I still need a GPS to go everywhere.

This is happening to many people now, where LLMs are replacing our thinking. My dad thinks he is writing his own memoirs. Yeah pop, weird how you and everyone else just started using the "X isn't Y, it's Z" trope liberally in your writing out of nowhere.

It's definitely scary. And it's definitely sinister. I maintain that this is intentional, and the system is working the way they want it to.

With the 70% you then pitch "I have this" and some Corp/VC will buyout the remaining 30%.

They then in return hire engineers who are willing to lap the 70% slop, and fix the rest with more AI slop.

Your brother dies happily achieving their dream of being a bazillionaire doing nothing more than typing a few sentences in a search bar.

You don’t even get the same ‘human’ with the same AI, as you can see with various prompting.

It’s like doing a lossy compression of an image, and then wondering why the color of a specific pixel isn’t quite right!

And, crickets. In practice I haven't seen any efficiencies despite my teams using AI in their work. I am not seeing delivery coming in under estimates, work costs what it always cost, we're not doing more stuff or better stuff, and my margins are the same. The only difference I can see is that I've had to negotiate a crapton of contractual amendments to allow my teams to use AI in their work.

I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype up and running which is like 5% of any project. Most technical work in enterprise isn't going from zero to something, it's maintaining something, or extending a big, old thing. AI stinks at that (today). You startup people with clean slates may have a different perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

>In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda stated that the widely propagandized personal achievements of Stakhanov actually were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support work, while the output was tallied for him alone.

It seems to me like too many yearly bonuses are tied to AI implementation, due to FOMO amongst C-levels. The hype trickles down to developers afraid that they won't get hired in the new AI economy.

I don't think there's a conspiracy, just a storm front of perverse incentives.

People making the decisions are 5%, they delegate to managers who delegate to their teams and all the way down.

Decision makers (not the guy who thinks corner radius should be 12 instead of 16, obviously) want higher ROI and they see AI working for them for high level stuff.

At low level things are never sane.

Before AI it was offshore. Now it’s offshore with AI.

Prepare for chaos, the machine priests have thrown open the warp gate. May the Emperor have mercy for us.

My report was entirely unacknowledged along with other reports that had negative findings. The team in charge published a self-report about the success rate and claimed over 90% perfect results.

About a year later, upper management changed to this style of hard requiring LLM usage. To the point of associating LLM api calls from your intellij instance with the git branch you were on and requiring 50% llm usage on a per-pr basis otherwise you would be pip-ed.

This is abusive behavior aimed at generating a positive response the c suite can give to the board.

And this is my real fear with the current crop of AI. That rather than improving the system to require less junk, we just use AI to generate junk and AI to parse AI-generated junk that another AI summarises ad infinitum…

Like, instead of building a framework that reduces boilerplate code, we use an LLM to generate that boilerplate instead (in a more complex and confusing manner than using a traditional template would).

Or, when dealing with legal or quasi-legal matters (like certifications), 1. Generate AI slop to fill a template 2. Use AI to parse that template and say whether it’s done 3. Use another to write a response.

Lots of paperwork happening near instantly, mostly just burning energy and not adding to either the body of knowledge or getting to a solution.

When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]" Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation".

The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees.

This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.

After all if they weren't stupid and lazy they would be important execs, not unimportant workers

Executives don't care about any of that and just want to make the organization more efficient. They don't care at all if the net effect is reducing headcount. In fact, they want that -- smaller teams are easier to manage and cheaper to operate in nearly every way. From an executive's standpoint, they have nothing to lose: the absolute worst-case scenario is it ends up over-hyped and in the process of rolling it out they learned who's willing to attempt change and who's not. They'll then get rid of the latter people, as they won't want them on the team because of that personality trait, and if AI tooling is broadly useful they won't even bother backfilling.

The project was renaming the HR department ...

After that I sent all executive emails to a folder and did not read them, my mood improved drastically by not reading those emails.