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Comment by donkey_brains | Hacker News Reader

Today a manager at my work asked all his teams including mine “please write up a report on how many engineers from your teams we could replace with AI”.

Surprisingly, the answer he got was “none, because that’s not how AI works”.

Guess we’ll see if that registers…

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I would love to have responded something like “only one: yours”

But in all seriousness, ai does a pretty good job at impersonating VPs. It’s confidently wrong and full of hope for the future.

You're absolutely right!

I use various agentic dev tools all day long, mostly with Opus. The tools are very capable now, but when planning mid-complexity features, I find the time estimates hilarious.

Phase 1: 1-2 weeks

Phase 2: 1 week

Phase 3: 2 weeks

8 to 12 hours later, all the work is done and tested.

The funny part to me was that if I had an AI true believer boss, I would report those time estimates directly, and have a lot of time to do other stuff.

When youre the boss telling kids how to work what time esti.ates will you believe?

Tis the cycle

Human time estimates are bad, but the ones that AI gives are just absurd. I've seen them used from small things like planning interviews and short presentations, all the way up to large scale projects. In no case do they make any sense to me. But I think people end up trusting them because they look so confident and well planned due to how the AIs break things down.

All of them because cost cutting is a red flag in business regardless of what year it is.

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