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Comment by ej88 | Hacker News Reader

"The psychic toll of AI" -- It's sad, but each of these scenarios (barring the AI notetaker, which I haven't found to be an issue personally but ymmv) are indicative more of the culture of the company than the tool itself. From my experience it seems like the most frontier companies have the best AI-use culture.

I work at a very 'AI-pilled' company, but:

- Everyone reads and reviews every PR and leaves human comments

- Documentation is written well and tended to by humans

- There's no 'AI mandate'

- Whether features are possible are first explored by an agent but manually traced by a human through the codebase

You can treat AI like a very powerful tool to augment you and run your agent swarms at the same time.

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Are there any companies that aren't AI-pilled at this point?

Odoo, Belgium, cloud ERP. Not very AI pilled, even if AI is considered and used somehow

Odoo suffers from others issues though. Not sure if this is still the case, but the mix of inline Python 2 Flask + XML was basically tech debt-as-a-service.

Also the very ugly death they gave OpenERP/Odoo on-premise.

It's Python 3, no Flask (but werkzeug) and XML templates. It works for hundred thkusand clients, and you can install Odoo on premise as you like. I'm 90% dedicated to that. So... explain the "tech debt" thing, as I don't get it. You don't need Rust or microservices for every use case. Don't be fooled by marketing style "old style technology" bias and set up an account. PostgreSQL with synchronous workers works perfectly for most people.

I am absolutely not a fan of "new style technology" as you might have understood.

I used to run Odoo on-premise for a small company about 3-4 years ago. The upgrade path (with the OpenUpgrade fork) was awful, many features (that WYSIWYG editor, Odoo Studio?) were locked to the cloud version, and there was little to no documentation. IIRC we even had to drop it because the delay between on-prem updates & cloud updates was too high.

And there were mentions of Flask in the logs, so no it wasn't just Werkzeug (which is synonymous with Flask since its inception, anyways).

I do not have fond memories of editing invoice templates blindly.

Ofc the cloud offering has much more, but you have to consider that no other major ERP software comes with the engine 100% opensource, in the kind of market. So yes, you may feel Odoo community a bit incomplete and probably don't want to pay the cloud version. But the alternatives are SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, some very fragmented open ecosystem, or some 90's GUI custom ERPs, right? I can tell you we use Werkzeug and not Flask, have reverse proxy nginx, use postgresql, and I don't see a lot of tech debt in that. Not much AI, all the reviews are manual and kinda strict.

most are not, e.g. if your company has any of these you're probably not ai pilled

- mandatory ai usage

- ai usage tied to kpis or performance reviews

- trainings on how to use claude code

- restrictions on what tools you can use

- layoffs

- engineers still typing every line of code by hand

Wait, I don't get it. Some of those are a bit contradicting, and for others I don't see how they _don't_ mean your company is "AI pilled"?

sorry, i shouldve defined it better. my point of view is an 'ai pilled' company is one that has a realistic understanding of the benefits and limitations of ai productivity, and leadership + employees are fully bought in, and theres a general high trust environment

if ai has to be enforced (mandatory usage, kpis, training, restrictions on tools) -> clearly the execs think the employees are not bought in

typing every line by hand -> self explanatory

layoffs -> this one is a bit of a stretch, but from what i've seen the best companies at leveraging ai are not laying people off, instead continuing to hire more to capture the market or capitalize on the demand. could be confounding variables though

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