I've worked in wholesale logistics (backend for inventory management) for many years way back when and let me tell you, cost of ink vs cost of a chip the least of the problems. Barcodes (and QR codes as used here) have two major flaws: reading them is challenging (works fine if the package is undamaged and you TRUST that it contains what it says on the box) and they're still just a number. RFID can help with both these issues and the savings from that can outweigh the additional cost by a lot.
Utility is key and RFID has a lot of advantages over bar codes (and QR codes).
I don't see the dependency amongst colleagues as a bad thing. The issues I saw when fielding those questions was folks not doing a simple search across the internal docs to answer the question themselves. Yes, LLMs make this initial search easier, and answer a majority of folks' questions.
The problem arises when it hallucinates answers. That results in colleagues operating based on invalid information, leading to bigger issues. I've seen this many times at my own company, and I simply do not know how to tell folks to be more discerning of the LLM responses while leadership is simultaneously saying do more, faster, with AI.
I've struggled with these feelings over the past week as I take some time away from work and the LLM madness. I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems. I miss the curiosity and learning!
It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?
I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.
> I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems.
If you aren’t having these, then your team is using these tools wrong. AI assisted coding should open you up to more of precisely these conversations. Then use them to implement that.
I wish! We put on a show for a while with tech spec reviews, but the specs were all AI slop. Now we don't even do that. Folks just work in their silos. I mostly learn of new functionality when I am assigned a code review. My feedback on those reviews is passed to an agent.
I am contemplating code review within my own organization, and the question I return to is:
> Does this organization prioritize human learning?
That has been my primary motivator for code reviews. I want to teach and learn from others, especially given the decreasing levels of collaboration due to increased AI usage.
The sad truth is that all of my feedback just goes straight to agents. Maybe 10% is reacted to by a human, so I’m left wondering if there’s any value to a real review aside from poorly training robots to do my job, and further atrophying the abilities of my team members.
Well, I can tell you that at my current job we had something of a crisis over the summer when we realized that nobody could make changes without fear of breaking things anymore because we lost the ability to tell which existing behaviors were and were not safe to change.
Previously the knowledge needed to discern that sort of thing would be disseminated through both design and code review sessions. But plan mode and AI code review largely put an end to that.
So we put our heads together and came up with some new policies about project management and how we use AI, and things have steadily getting better since then.
(Though, in fairness, the one guy who seems to actually enjoy getting paged after hours seems to be having less fun.)
Strict WIP limits, all non-trivial projects need two human collaborators who are both responsible for understanding and signing off on the project plan, docs, code, test strategy, etc., and regular sync-up meetings.
Yes, human code review is back. AI is allowed to help, but we require that two actual humans actually understand every change. And yeah, it did speed things up. Not the rate at which we were shipping code, of course. But the rate at which we were shipping usable product.
This is actually in line with a well-established Six Sigma practice. When you've got a poorly performing value chain, the first thing to do is find out which step is struggling and then force the step immediately before it to slow down. If the reason why isn't obvious, search for a clip of the I Love Lucy chocolate factory scene on YouTube for a perfect explanation.
I disagree. Most of my prompts are “implement ”. The issue has a user story and acceptance criteria that the LLM uses to write a plan and ultimately produce code. None of that matters since the code artifact is what actually gets pushed in the repo, thus the code is what should be reviewed.
There was/is a believe that more folks can unblock themselves with access to AI. There is some truth to this. Our product managers and sales folks are achieving more with Claude and MCPs pointed at tools they use.
The downside, however, is they are also unknowingly digging themselves into holes. For example, we have AI-generated skills that are thousands of lines long and include Python scripts with hundreds of lines of tests. Some of these Python functions are literally just emitting MCP tool names.
Why even be concerned with the prompt, it's an undeveloped thought from someone who doesn't care enough to develop it themself. It's essentially a tweet.
We use Node.js, so all we need to do is run a script initializing Otel before running the app. We set this up following the docs a few years ago, and haven’t had to change it much since then.
I think their point is that there's business value in the usage data and linear is using that value in a way that benefits them but not the customers they got it from.
It reminds me of matt levine's reframing of insider trading where it's not about fairness it's about theft. You're supposed to get secret insights and use them to get an edge. What you can't do is get an edge for yourself with secret insights that your employer got.
So it roughly comes down to "that data is valuable and rightfully belongs to the originating company." Which then makes this a contract diligence type situation.
My company uses Linear. The data presented in this blog post is worthless to me and the company. It can be crudely summarized as “agents and agentic development processes are conducting more Linear operations.” Duh!
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