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Comment by conartist6 | Hacker News Reader

That's so depressing, and a real loss for your employer. Even if they neither know nor care that you are now sandbagging them, you still are. You aren't making real gains because you're tossing out value of equivalent or greater worth (your learning and engagement)

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Most places I worked at cared very little for quality code, there was much more pressure on shipping fast even if it meant incurring technical debt, crap performance for end users, or developers leaving due to legacy code accumulation that nobody understood anymore.

I'm glad there is a tool that let's these companies have even shittier code shipped even faster. The faster they burn down the better.

This seems the right place in the discussion to mention The Gervais Principle, a legendary piece of business writing if you haven't heard of it. https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

You can only learn and engage so much in a day. In my head, it can be healthy to shift from tiring yourself out via work to tiring yourself out at home. You're not sandbagging them, you're setting boundaries on how much you're willing to do. If this is a problem for the employer, they can act accordingly.

I'm amazed you think typical corporations care about staff learning and engagement in the first place.

There's a reason they're trying to replace humans with AI: they just want outcomes. People learning and growing is only useful if it generates better outcomes. If you can get the same thing with a bunch of reverse centaurs, from a corporate perspective that's better: labour becomes more fungible and you can spend even less on training and investment in staff (assuming you ever did). And do it right and those folks will just train your machines to make them even better (see: Meta capturing worker activity and reallocating large numbers of staff to data labelling).

Sure, but that's a big big big big big big big big big big "if".

All AI has really succeeding in proving so far is that humans CAN really, very much "keep up", despite repeated repeated repeated repeated assertions that in six months it will not be so

Oh I'm aware. I'm not saying it makes any g-d sense. I'm just saying that's the corporate logic. So for those of us stuck in AI pilled orgs, the best bet is to play the game and keep your skills sharp on the side in case the whole thing goes pear shaped.

But it isn't a loss for any employers. They're not being sandbagged in any way. It's the path they've chosen, knowingly and willingly.

But that's obviously exactly what the employer expects, I don't see the problem tbh ;)

I'm with you except that the economy will crash when it turns out everyone stopped creating real value. ...and in the mean time every real product I have to use is getting worse.

I think we're way past this point tbh, software development is just the latest area that's being "bullshittified" ;)

(also let's be honest, building yet another CRUD app - eg what 99% of software devs actually do, is not "creating value" - with or without AI)

Where they created value wasn't just the CRUD app but developing their skills, supporting communities that asked and answered questions to build public knowledgebases. They adapted to painfully repetitive tasks by developing tools that made expressing common ideas simple. In losing the pain of repetition, we lost the incentive towards abstraction. The forces in opposite directions cancelled out, creating growth for AI companies but overall stagnation due to the immense amount of value lost because before AI there was never a dollar value put on it.

No one put a dollar amount on stagnation?

On the lack thereof

No one put a dollar amount on [the lack of] stagnation?

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