Ask HN: How did your boss's behavior change with the rise of AI?
I am trying to understand whether the rise of AI affects managers and the work dynamics positively or negatively
It's insulting.
We read it, spend several hours trying to figure it out, because nothing makes sense in the context of the business. Finally, we bring him into the call to ask him what he’s thinking and what the prompt was, and then after we shoot holes in it he shrugs it off as, “just an idea.”
I have stopped reading his AI emails. I can’t be bothered anymore after the first two.
He also keeps asking us for ideas of how we can use AI in our work. Our job is to automate stuff so it happens the same way every time. Replacing something that’s already automated to produce a reliable and repeatable output doesn’t make sense. As far as I can tell, AI would make everything worse by increasing costs and opening the door for variability in a process that is supposed to be standardized. It’s just AI for the sake of AI.
In my last review, all I was told was I should use AI more, because usage is being tracked. I said I was using it, and that seems to appease him for the time being. So he didn’t look at the report, he just knows more AI == better.
I’d say it’s been negative overall.
I do think there is real potential for AI to help with delivery and businesses but mature businesses need to look at their setup first to enable AI.
* regularly generating AI-slop code changes that nearly work, and then trying to hand over to someone else for "completion". this is often a pretty terrible experience, and more work than just having a single person take ownershiop of the _outcome_ - i.e. understand the need, write the code, test it, deliver, make sure it works... generally the coding was never the hard part, and its harder to start with broken code than just from scratch.
* sporadically sharing AI analysis of bugs/problems/crashes/troubleshooting type stuff. again, often nearly correct... but sometimes more work finding the incorrect aspect than starting from scratch.
* lots of AI flavored text and presentations. you know the kind, text where every bullet point is a different emoticon, and AI-generated graphics instead of random, but real photos stolen from the internet.
* lots of AI for code review, either of changes (PRs), or just wholesale analysis of code bases to find problems and automatically create tickets for people to "fix". often , the analysis is not "wrong", and potentially very good... the problem is that it finds "problems" in utilities that don't run in production, historical code just stored for archival purposes, anything and everything... it has no concept of "this is live internet-facing code" vs "this is an ad-hoc utility that does not need to be bulletproof". the volume of work created by AI in this space is truly impressive.
* lots of AI "recipes" for things that could have/should have been check lists / processes / shell scripts / python utilities / actual software. instead of something actually fast, deterministic, and re-usable, the "recipe" now mostly works, but takes several minutes and does slightly different things each time that cannot really be predicted or reasoned about.