When I was looking for an apartment recently, the big "luxury" buildings use AI agents to schedule tours and answer questions. Tours are also self-serve, you don't actually get to meet and talk to anyone. It's a crappy experience. I had to call an AI agent to figure out how to get in the front door of a building and it completely failed to answer this very basic question (fortunately someone eventually saw me knocking). When I toured one large complex there were several groups wandering through the building at once. It did not give me a particularly safe feeling to see that random people going everywhere in the buildings unescorted had been completely normalized.
> While the ease of generating code this way triggered a greater dopamine reward
I get zero dopamine rush from this. I get a dopamine rush from building something or figuring something out myself. I don't get a dopamine rush for generating thousands of lines of code that I then have to try to understand.
That's one model of private equity, but PE has also been buying up very successful local businesses in areas like veterinary care. The PE firm keeps the name and branding of the local vet because people have traditionally wanted to take their pet to a trusted local vet, not a big chain.
> One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.
Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?
And why cannot they have someone associated with Anthropic as co-author? That’s not obvious at all. For sure they would prefer to be the only ones, but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies, even if they are technically competitors. What is inappropriate about it?
IIRC that happened with evolution. In the initial presentation of Darwin and Wallace's work on evolution (presented with their consent by someone else) Wallace was described as the primary author since he was planning to publish first.
Of course, no one understood that presentation so it was Darwin's later book that everyone remembers
Holy late capitalism. Everything revolves around line-go-up, and sociopaths rule the show. These people cannot even collaborate like civilised scientists on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics?
“It would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” I cannot believe this shit.
AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.
A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.
When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.
Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.
On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.
This is just wrong. A lot of people take tremendous pride in their work. Particularly highly-skilled people who have been doing the work for a long time.
Joe Biden used to say this all the time - that a job is more than a paycheck, it's an identity and a sense of purpose, often a big part of our social lives as well. Or if you prefer the other side, Trump likes to say that coal miners don't want to learn computers, they want their coal mining jobs back.
With one colleague, I was leaving PR comments and he would just put my feedback into the AI and paste its response. So I decided to cut out the middleman and now I just @cursor and tell it to trim unnecessarily long comments.
Of all the things in this thread - this is the one that grinds my gears the most. Colleagues that believe it’s ok to reply with unedited garbage when you engage with them as a human.
I don’t think we need to write code anymore unless we want to - but we DO need to be humans, and respect the time of other people.
One coworker had their agent respond to me, with "from Claude : robot emoji:" at the end, that made me mad.
Then another coworker just pasted the Claude response with no signature and no comment and no context as if they had written it themself. That made me livid. I used to like that guy. No respect anymore.
It's really important to define what "people who can leverage AI" means. I've found that using AI judiciously with close human supervision provides an advantage, but using the latest models with the latest harnesses can look like it's giving you a huge advantage superficially while actually costing you more time in the long run.
That's hard to define, but I measure it as how quickly people reach for AI for complex, tedious tasks. Let's say you're doing market research for a car to buy. A person who doesn't use AI, might just ask ChatGPT, but many websites block searches like that now. Someone who uses CC or Codex could ask it and it will use curl to get the live data and make a HTML you can browse.
Another is someone making a workout plan or a meal plan. Coders will ask AI to make a plan and add it to their calendar using GOG Cli. It's a fundamental shift in thinking and that hasn't diffused to the mass public yet. But just like the internet, it will get to them eventually. In the mean time, those who leverage AI like that will have an advantage.
If you're already trending towards 10x developer status in a niche area of programming, sure, AI will secretly make you less productive (in that niche) while making you feel like you're going faster, for a little while.
For everyone and every other situation, hard disagree.
We're currently wasting a lot of time cleaning up slop created by overusing AI. The loop is: developer uses AI to create a huge amount of code very quickly. But the developer didn't understand the underlying system very well so the specs generated by the AI contain a lot of faulty assumptions and the code was then built on those assumptions. So you have features that probably shouldn't have existed in the first place, but because they do exist people have provided feedback on them, and the developer then uses the AI to implement that feedback, but still doesn't understand the system so much of the code for the revisions is still wrong. So that individual developer saw a huge productivity increase, in the sense that he generated a vast amount of code really quickly, but the team as a whole saw a productivity decrease.
Ironic plot twist, AI is just exposing your coworker's weakness. They could slow down and understand before blasting away at code, or explicitly hang back and generate tech demos/PoCs for architectural choices while building understanding, but they didn't. The only reason things were ok before was because they were handicapped to a speed slower than their ability to figure things out.
Is it a weakness of the individual or is it a systemic issue where management sees how fast a single task can be "completed" with AI so they set goals that can only be achieved if you offload everything to AI and then fall into the trap I described above.
If management isn't giving people enough time to verify work, that's on them. If management is giving people enough time, but saying "go fast" and people interpret that as "YOLO" that's on the employee.
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