Post

Colin McMillen
@mcmillen.dev

a really common opinion i'm seeing from my friends in the software industry is that AI takes away the fun / easy parts of the job, but it's not like your workload goes down as a result, so you spend an increasing fraction of your time doing the shittiest tasks

Brian Merchant@bcmerchant.bsky.social

Across the US, workers are souring on AI. The tech industry has insisted that AI would make workers’ lives easier and more productive, that the more people understood and used AI, the more they would like it. Something closer to the opposite has happened.

bloodinthemachine.comWhy office workers are turning against AIWhether or not you like AI at work ultimately boils down to a question of power.

10 reposts62 likes

Erica "digifox" Kovac
@digifox.binaryden.net

I've so far pivoted toward "I can farm out the stuff I dread and do the stuff I don't dread by hand or lightly machine assisted" and I don't actually mind it. Workload hasn't really changed in my part of the shop, bottleneck is still decision-making, not code.

yuri
@fuurei.bsky.social

unfortunately for me, the stuff i dread most (communicating carefully, diplomatically, and accurately with people i don't know well on topics where i don't know wtf i'm talking about) happen to also be the things AI is worst at

Sean McCullough
@banksean.bsky.social

I once heard that the typical GWS SWE spent all of their time reviewing CLs (submitted from SWEs outside of GWS) instead of actually writing code, so that role tended to burn SWEs out. This was 10+ years ago, but I'm sure the lesson will sink in any day now.

Richard Drillman, DDR
@tankbusgun.bsky.social

Or your job has zero tasks that ai can do reliably so even if you DO use it, you still have to check it's work, except now you have none of the mental structure so you have to think for it anyway, completely defeating the point of using it.

Colin McMillen
@mcmillen.dev

Yeah, and the thing I've heard from some is that it's too easy for people to send them slop CLs for review, so the review process takes a lot longer because you can no longer assume the person on the other end put an appropriate amount of effort into it.

Dave, admirer of squirrels
@quercusmax.bsky.social

I personally spend a fair amount of time deslopifying my PRs and ensuring we're actually testing with realistic fakes instead of mocks that lie all day long. So I just Claude to build me more realistic test infra, and it does a better job than half the SETIs I worked with at Google.

Colin McMillen
@mcmillen.dev

(Obviously this depends on the nature if the project a lot; if most of your reviews are coming from the same dozen people who share an office floor, that's different than if your codebase gets contributions from hundreds of people in 10 different timezones)