You're holding your AI wrong | Hacker News Reader

You're holding your AI wrong

cdibona.substack.com

34 pointsmooreds15 comments

I agree with this, except that I think Page ignores two important meeting types: Q&As and Working Sessions. Maybe Page defines a meeting as having >3 members, but many of my non-salesy meetings are these two types.

Q&As: Today, I was working on a demo for a customer. I am a Data & AI person, and the demo concerned data processing for cybersecurity, so I got on a meeting with a cybersecurity expert working on the same demo. I asked him to walk me through his typical day working with a particular software product, asked a bunch of questions, and had everything I needed for the demo in 30 minutes. We could have done this through slack with a bunch of Looms, but it would have taken 4x as long and broken up his flow a lot more. Oftentimes, we will have one person on the team dive deep into a particular technology and give us a lecture + Q&A on what we need to know about it for our current project and the best resources to learn more.

Working Sessions: Sometimes you need to build something that interacts with a separate component that someone else is currently working on. Sometimes several people are working on the same project. Sometimes a junior engineer at my mostly-remote company needs an opportunity to learn some SWE fundamentals. These are situations where, pre-remote work, I would camp out next to their desk or in a conference room and we would work through things together. Now, a meeting serves the same purpose.

I don't think your example is at odds with the content of the article. The sentiment is to make sure meetings are meaningful and only with the people that need to be attending them. It's not that meetings are inherently bad, but that it's easy for them to become excessive and frequent. Meetings are necessary and useful, but they can also create a lot of unproductive time. To me when they do it's a sign that the business is being taken over by bureaucrats. Because they don't want to work to accomplish things, they want to work to work.

The problem with what CEOs like Page do here is that they are out of touch. It’s easy to say things like this when everyone is paid to listen to you and do whatever you want.

You can make these bold statements that sound insightful but at the end of the day there are many reasons why I would like to talk to some teammates, or another team, that don’t have an action or a decision attached to it.

After being fully remote for over five years now, I will say something unpopular and that is face time is valuable. Humans are complicated and empathetic and value is lost if we only ever interact in a slack thread or over a faceless Zoom call where I just stare at your name on a black box for 30 minutes.

Meetings without an agenda are a waste of time? I guess you just don’t value human contact at all, so that tells me more about you than it does about the quality of your meetings. Me? I can learn a lot about how a project is going simply by listening and watching someone talk about it and that context will be completely stripped from an email, chat or zoom tile.

But CEOs are widely considered to be overrepresented with dark triad psychological traits. We shouldn’t be surprised when they just don’t get people and want to throw away things they can’t immediately extract value from.

Yeah I don't disagree with you. I just think the example was not counter. Definitely agree that people are disillusioned by surrounding themselves with "yes men". Even if they think they don't. But that's a joke as old as time. Maybe even funnier that so many can't see that they're that person.

And I do agree with you that face time matters. But a lot of things do. I'll come to the office, but it only makes sense if I have a door. If I'm in an open room then you don't need to schedule a meeting for me to be in one. Hell, I might even be an unwilling participant to the meeting of two people having a conversation behind my back or in front of me.

There's a lot of cost saving measures and productivity enhancers that cost a lot of money and productivity.

How can executives become executives without understanding the purpose and function of meetings.

I feel like I had this sorted out in ‘95, and assumed everyone got it straight at about the same age (~30).

MEETINGS ARE NOT CODE. They are not necessarily part of any logical machinery of business. They do not necessarily perform a pivotal function in the moment. They are, however, part of a vital social process of building and managing business relationships regarding shared responsibility. This is why people keep calling them. Not always or necessarily because of decisions to be made.

If a meeting doesn’t need me or care about me I won’t go. Or I’ll leave. This is a rare occurrence on projects.

> if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email

That’s essentially what I’m doing when sending an AI. We don’t use zoom, but I’ll join Teams meetings, zoom out and work on something else while people have endless meaningless circular discussions near the end I’ll ask copilot to summarize points and actions and just ask people if they agree that there are those actions for them saved me having to sit and waste my attention on the meeting that could have been an e-mail or teams discussion.

> if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email, or not having that meeting at all

Oh hey, my thoughts every time I’m pitched a new customer service chat bot.

If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, an AI will probably be doing it at some point. The only question is how soon.

A very thought provoking statement.

We're already seeing LLMs being used to write emails that are then summarized by other LLMs, having AIs attend pointless meetings with other AIs is just the next evolution.

(To be clear, I don't particularly like or want this, but it seems inevitable.)

I wish my AI twin could have read this article for me and told me.... dont bother.

Quite often the meeting starts as “let me pick your brain on something“. This kind of expert advice from AI would save time and improve productivity of the team.

What?!

Or, in other words, if you meant it as a joke, it's not bad. But if you meant it seriously, I doubt many people find it useful to pick your brain-- you have so little respect for yourself that you believe you have already been replaced by AI.

Excellent writing style

I think this is more than just AI. When your main tool is duct tape then you use duct tape to fix the problems the duct tape made. Duct tape isn't even a good tape, not even for a one size fits all tape.

I swear, 80% of enshitification is because you can only patch things so much. A patch is a quick fix and a patch on a patch is an emergency.

We've created a world where we can move fast and break things, but no one ever cleans up the mess. We've created a world where we've convinced everyone you can learn anything fast and don't need any depth. We've created a world where you can get funding to upend an industry without hiring a single person working in that industry or having any domain expertise. We're just creating solutions looking for problems to solve, mindlessly optimizing arbitrary metrics, instead of trying to solve problems. We can still make large sums of money AND solve real problems at the same time. These need but be mutually exclusive.

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