Hacker News Reader

Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

I can’t get over how bad “Rovo” is. Somehow more aggressive and useless than Microsoft putting “Copilot” everywhere.

It’s objectively worse than using something like Cowork + MCP, AND they injected it into every single page on JIRA and Confluent which has made web browsing way slower while all the junk is loading.

View on HN

Rovo has my favorite example of AI misfeature. Just checked, it's still there in Cloud Confluence. In Edit mode for a page, you can select a range of text and a menu will pop up, with Ask Rovo being a drop down on it. There's a few good options... Improve Formatting, translation options, Make Shorter...

... but it also has Make Longer. Yes, a built-in feature to type some text in, and the use the mighty power of AI to bloat it.

Naturally, you can repeat this process several times on the same text, for your own little personal demonstration of what model collapse looks like in real time.

Don't worry, you can use Rovo to summarize the document! That way you can get the information your coworker wanted to share but filtered through a game of teLLMephone.

We’ve gone from proof-of-work to proof-of-no-work.

What's even worse is that, when you do this on the description of a story or task, everytime it comes up with a slightly different format of how it's going to layout the "enhanced" description.

I've tried the "Make Longer" and "Make Shorter".

When you go "Make longer" the text gets longer.

When you go "Make shorter", the text gets longer still.

You'd think that the original text would be the oracle for shorter(longer(original))?

> You'd think

I'm going to have to stop you right there

That's some hillarious misnaming, I love it. It probably was meant to be something like "make more comprehensible, use simpler language but more words" and we got this.

But for their target market, corporate office drones writing crap that nobody will ever read more than once (if even that), this is actually perfect and makes AI usage numbers go up. "Make longer" is amazing for someone who just wants to pretend they put more effort than they actually did.

(of course, everyone else can do that too, and the length/literacy of prose is no longer a good proxy for effort. In nature, "honest signalling" only works if the signal is costly. Removing the cost from the signal makes the signal worthless)

>I can’t get over how bad “Rovo” is. Somehow more aggressive and useless than Microsoft putting “Copilot” everywhere.

You're looking at it the wrong way. Think about how much better it is than the joke of a search tool that's slightly to the left of it's icon.

I just asked it to do a summary or a status page for my staff so I can share the high level details. Somehow it retrieved a version of the page from two weeks ago and summarised that. When I said, this is old, it happily said, yep, I'll do a summary of the current page. I kinda feel there may be people in between the box and some lame LLM.

Our PM trialed it for writing user stories and most of it was “ticket description but as gherkin stories” which is good, but it made like 2-3 stories referencing a data structure and fields we were not planning on whatsoever - idek where it got the idea from, none of what it wanted to do was covered _anywhere_

Have you seen the markdown agent instructions they provide in their new agentic `twg` cli? 70k tokens one average, there are more than one...

Rovo is the worse Ai I have used, I suggested they stop trying and let us have model choice. Save money and don't do things out of their skill sets

Don’t use it? You don’t have to

Yup, we stopped using Atlassian completely. Highly recommended.

Yeah, for sure don't use it. It's complete slop. The help strings do not match the real args/flags.

We went back to calling the API directly, writing scripts for the agent, then taking those scripts away and just having our CI workflow run them and then hand off a `.review` directory to the agents. We give them fewer tools and permissions, them seem to stay on task more instead of being "relentlessly proactive"

The rovo CLI is beating Claude Code in some benchmarks. It works pretty well for me.

Rovo makes for an INCREDIBLE time reading jira tickets and confluence pages. Someone wrote YES in all caps in a page ? Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024.

Whenever I feel like I'm bad at software development, I look at Atlassian and I feel good.

> Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024.

The problem with our brave new AI world is I can’t tell if this is real or not

It's real but not literally. It will absolutely make up acronyms but I never heard of a Yassified Entertainment Setting.

Maybe it exists! Maybe it doesn't! Maybe ROVO actually means Really Overtly Violent Opportunities! And Rovo can make it all up as it goes.

I’ve been adding a “terms” section to every AI-used project due to these hallucinations. We abbreviate our company name eeeeverywhere and even Opus gets this wrong constantly. Obv I’m not adding “YES==yes” but that’s hilarious!

When it was new I tried something fairly easy, or so I thought

"Label all stories in the current project that contain "foo" with label "bar

It failed

"has made web browsing way slower while all the junk is loading" describes all web development since the 90s

I hate it, they've just gone and smooshed a bunch more AI crap into Jira too in the last few days.

Useless buttons to "suggest subtasks" and "improve issue" and offer to write the description. Absolutely useless nonsense, I wish I could turn it all off and there is an issue on their bug tracker with that request (turning it off as an individual user), and it has many votes, but at the moment you can only disable it globally as admin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com