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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.

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Yeah but if you can't attack the workers and make them hate their lives, are you even a good capitalist? Didn't Milton Friedman die for our bosses right to stomp on our faces in the pursuit of profit?

Alienation is inherent to the system.

I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.

A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious compliance.

Well here’s where you can level valid complaints against management I think. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t line up super well with “wait for empirical studies to back up your suspicions”

For sure. Just because the studies are incomplete or difficult doesn’t mean they’re useless. We still do unit testing and type systems continue to get more sophisticated and spread further because we believe they have an effect on quality and productivity regardless of the lack of evidence.

However it takes some taste in engineering and perhaps some mathematical sophistication to figure these things out. “Just use AI,” is not a very convincing argument either.

It’ll take time to sort out, I wager.

“Beyond clear” I wouldn’t say that confidently. Even now I’m not sure I agree with that, especially looking at it long term.

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