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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

I heard it posited that the Ai stuff is uncovering corporate dysfunction better than any tool in history, i.e. garbage in garbage out, because their processes are so broken

I must admit the idea has a lot of appeal, because there are people seeing good ROIs, so it does not seem to be the tool as much as the tool user

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It's part dysfunction for sure, but it's mostly just reality being messy. Anyone who worked on a bigger engineering problem, solving real business problem, learns very quickly that reality is messy and doesn't conform to rules. And that's usually main challenge of building any project.

And it's problem specific to software engineering. Any engineering deals with it - when you manufacture physical things, for example, tolerances, safety factors, etc, are all tools to deal with reality being messy.

Yeah, I think the moral of the story is if your company is not good at technology AI does not magically make you good at technology.

The company needs to have the right culture and ability to integrate leading technology, whatever it is.

That's an interesting take, but doesn't it work backwards from the desired result ("AI" performs near miracles) to processes are so broken? That seems counter to all the enthusiastic application of LLMs to everything. People want "AI" to solve problems, and seem to be doing everything they can to put it everywhere and try everything.

I don't start at the ai performs miracles point tho

I start with, AI can be really useful tool

That some orgs being bad at tool use and coordination is now on full display, this follows naturally for me

> garbage in garbage out, because their processes are so broken

That's, I'd argue, the majority of companies though, which still spells a problem for the AI bubble.

I've been a part of enough failed ERP implementation projects to know that there's actually very few enterprises out there that collectively have their shit together and are good at implementing technology.

If AI also can't solve that problem for them, it'll just join the long list of already existing boring enterprise tech that some successful companies use to great effect, and others ignore or fail to adopt, which isn't exactly a multi-trillion dollar industry to live up to the current hype.

> uncovering corporate dysfunction better than any tool in history, i.e. garbage in garbage out

in the times when Agile was still just a way of work (not a mantra), adopting it showed exactly the glaring troubles in the overall (human) pipeline. But it needed quite some time - like months of work - to really show.

This seems same thing, only much faster..

Actually making some parallels might be interesting.. agile was/is also touted as "the silver bullet"..

this is a great analogy

My first job out of University was with a startup that had been recently acquired by IBM. I have never seen true agile since. Similar 1/100 actually do it really well and proper. I should see if I still have the slide deck I made to tell the rest of IBM, would make for a great blog post and bringing in this thread, chef's kiss?

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