Well… That's no longer true, is it?
My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.
And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person.
AI is already unavoidable.
My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.
The fact that companies have to force you to use it with quotas and threats is damning.
“Why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flAIr?”
It's mostly a sign leadership has lost reasoning capability if it's mandatory.
But no, reporting isn't necessarily the problem. There are plenty of places that use reporting to drive a conversation on what's broken, and why it's broken for their workflow, and then use that to drive improvement.
It's only a problem if the leadership stance is "Haha! We found underpants gnome step 2! Make underpants number go up, and we are geniuses". Sadly not as rare as one would hope, but still stupid.
All of this predates LLMs (what “AI” means today) becoming a useful product. All of this happened already with previous generations of “AI”.
It was just even shittier than the version we have today.
This is what I always think of when I imagine how AI will change the world and daily life. Automation doesn't have to be better (for the customer, for the person using it, for society) in order to push out the alternatives. If the automation is cheap enough, it can be worse for everyone, and still change everything. Those are the niches in ehich I'm most certain will be here to stay— because sometimes, it hardly matters if it's any good.
If you're lucky. I've had LLMs that just repeatedly hang up on me when they obviously hit a dead end.
AI's not exactly a step down from that.
I'd argue that's not true. It's more of a stated goal. The actual goal is to achieve the desired outcome in a way that has manageable, understood side effects, and that can be maintained and built upon over time by all capable team members.
The difference between what business folks see as the "output" of software developers (code) and what (good) software developers actually deliver over time is significant. AI can definitely do the former. The latter is less clear. This is one of the fundamental disconnects in discussions about AI in software development.
I'm going to say this next thing as someone with a lot of negative bias about corporations. I was laid off from Twitter when Elon bought the company and at a second company that was hemorrhaging users.
Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is the point.
Maybe I'm not understanding you're point, but this is the kind of thing that happens in software teams all the time and is one of those "that's why they call it work" realities of the job.
If something "seems right/passed review/fell apart" then that's the reviewer's fault right? Which happens, all the time! Reviewers tend to fall back to tropes and "is there tests ok great" and whatever their hobbyhorses tend to be, ignoring others. It's ok because "at least it's getting reviewed" and the sausage gets made.
If AI slashed the amount of time to get a solution past review, it buys you time to retroactively fix too, and a good attitude when you tell it that PR 1234 is why we're in this mess.
No, it's the author's fault. The point of a code review is not to ensure correctness, it is to improve code quality (correctness, maintainability, style consistency, reuse of existing functions, knowledge transfer, etc).
If everyone on your team is doing that, it's not long before huge chunks of your codebase are conceptually like stuff that was written a long time ago by people who left the company. Except those people may have actually known what they were doing. The AI chatbots are generating stuff that seems to plausibly work well enough based on however they were prompted.
There are intangible parts of software development that are difficult to measure but incredibly valuable beyond the code itself.
> Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is the point.
This could be the vibe coder mantra. And it's true on day one. Once you've got reasonably complex software being maintained by one or more teams of developers who all need to be able to fix bugs and add features without breaking things, it's not quite as simple as "make the machine do the thing."
And its tricky because I'm trying not to appeal to emotion despite being fascinated with how this tool has enabled me to do things in a short amount of time that it would have taken me weeks of grinding to get to and improves my communication with stakeholders. That feels world changing. Specifically my world and the day-to-day roll I play when it comes to getting things done.
I think it is fine that it fell short of your expectations. It often does for me as well but it's when it gets me 80% of the way there in less than a day's work, then my mind is blown. It's an imperfect tool and I'm sorry for saying this but so are we. Treat its imperfections in the same way you would with a JR developer- feedback, reframing, restrictions, and iterate.