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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it is way worse than that. In the past two days, I have had two separate non-engineer team members ask some AI agent how some mobile bug should be fixed and posted the AI response in the ticket as the main content and context and acceptance criteria. I then had to waste my time reading this crap (because this is really all that is in the ticket) before starting my own efforts to understand what the real ask or change in behavior needed is.

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Our leader wrote himself a great prompt to fill up Tickets in jira with useless text too and our boss is happy like if he won the lottery. Now instead of ugly but short useful texts now i have yo read a fucking eassay!!!

Nah, you know how it works? You're not supposed to read it!

Encoding Process

One sentence in -> Several paragraphs out

Decoding Process

Several paragraphs in -> One sentence out

You were supposed to feed it back into the lying machine to dustill the content from the vapor, not read it. You are not AI native worker and should be kicked out of the otherwise great performing team

Better than dealing with a PM though

Like look, your boss was happy, so the blockade away from your boss that your PM provides is solved

So just write an agent to summarize and read the room like the 200 EQ mastermind that it is, compared to your 0 EQ engineer brain, and move on

AI writing tickets, AI reading tickets, AI writing code from said tickets

only ones affected are middle management and site reliability engineers, poof we can write complex backend scripts too now

No you don't. Feed the essay to Claude and ask it to summarize it for you, or just use the Jira MCP and have Claude or codex take the ticket, use the GitHub MCP to get it the source, have it go work on the ticket, have it generate the code, generate some unit tests, then you go literally yell at your computer using Wispr Flow or some other transcription software to tell Claude how to fix the mess it made, and then you after you've cleaned it up, you submit the PR.

When ChatGPT first came out three years ago, we joked about Devin and having an AI coworker, but I was just given 5 tickets to work on before break, and damned if AI didn't take a well scoped ticket and just did it before I even finished reading that very tightly scoped ticket.

While I personally find that generative AI has helped me be more productive and even boosted my ability to learn things, I really _dislike_ that we’ve normalized this behavior:

Whether a Jira ticket, an email, a yearly review, we feed bullet points into a black box to get a bunch of fluffy text. On the other end, we feed the fluffy text into the black box to get bullet points.

We’re killing penguins because we’re somehow afraid to just send the simplified bullet points to each other in the first place.

New career path unlocked — reverse prompt engineering — trying to determine what someone prompted the AI given the slop they put into a ticket

Plot twist: this universe (planet) was created in order to reverse engineer what the prompt of the previous one was.

It's not that much of a twist, given that it was basically the plot of THGTTG.

THGTTG was actually just an early version of the prompt. "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"

I think you’re kidding but some LinkedIn influencer will come across this and preach that it’s serious

You close the ticket and ping the manager of the nontechnical person submitting the ticket. Then you have a discussion with management about the arrangement and expectations. If it doesn't go well you polish your resume.

That sounds like good advice for someone 1) in a less hierarchical organization, and 2) during a period when jobs are easy to get.

Or someone who

1) has the savings such that they aren't a wage slave (applies to any income level)

2) has any dignity

People willingly put themselves in situations where they have no autonomy and no options by living their entire lives paycheck to paycheck or close enough to not make a difference.

That’s a pretty judgmental take. The only people with dignity in your formulation are independently wealthy.

If I stomped out the door as soon as I had to curb my tongue, I would never build the social and reputational capital required to be effective on bigger projects, and those are fun (to me).

We're in tech and this shit is happening in big tech companies. Yes, there's many of us who are not getting those wages but every one of them is independently wealthy.

Regardless, you are not a slave. Have a backbone. If you do not stand up for yourself you make it harder for others to do so. Your actions don't just affect you.

People at ALL wage levels put themselves into wage slavery by setting up their finances in a way where they have very little buffer. Mortgage, car payments, savings levels, and all sorts of things combine into being even briefly unemployed is a terrific burden.

In that state, you can't say no, you can't stand up for yourself or anyone else, you can't make choices because choices have significant life effects. You don't have to have a $10MM trust fund to escape this. You just have to live far enough under your means that you have the savings and spending profile that allows you "fuck you" privileges.

Everybody living so close to broke all the time makes everything more expensive, particularly the competitive things like housing.

Your manager should be on their ass for wasting your time.

Worse yet, these were done by the managers of the Marketing team and the Mapping team. Plus, these are high profile issues that (somehow) required getting the CEO involved too! (Obviously there is a lot of dysfunction in our organization, lol.)

I was going to joke to GP "jokes on you, management is in on it" but apparently it was no joke

There is also another way to view this:

People who have a sloppy/lazy way of working are exposed more quickly by this.

Got this kind of crap from multiple tickets I filed with GitHub

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