Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow?

40 pointsjc_81194 comments

This is something I’ve been turning over in my head lately. I’m not denying AI is being used everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s actually helping businesses overall. If we shut it all down it seems that businesses would be fine (and maybe even better since there’d be no token burning budgets).

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Pretty much nothing. We'd remove the AI integrations, the UI elements, then back to where we were. Luckily, we have no load bearing AI.

But if everyone else got to keep their AI, we'd lose customers very quickly.

so ironic to see “load bearing” in a comment about removing AI. certain phrases have been ruined by fable/opus 5 for all time.

I had this conversation recently. Not only are search engines and comment threads getting filled with AI responses, but people are increasingly sounding like AI themselves. This makes it even harder to distinguish.

Related to code quality, I've noticed developers picking up tricks from AI. Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention. If any used paths in their branches, it was almost certainly their name. Now everyone uses this convention. Though, they do use correct capitalization instead of lowercase freaking _everything_ that AI does.

What. Strict branch naming like feature/, bugfix/, chore/, release/ has been the standard for probably 10 years now in all projects I've been in, often enforced by auto-rejecting pushes that don't comply.

I've used that style in 3 different companies over the last 10 years and I assumed the technique was ubiquitous. This just goes to show the standard deviation in engineering culture is high. There are some large bodies of water but also lots and lots of little isolated tide pools.

Yeah, we've had our CI only run pipelines on proper branch prefixes for many years, so if you for whatever reason had a wip/branch you wouldn't clog up our runners.

Never used it in any of the projects I’ve been on.

> Related to code quality, I've noticed developers picking up tricks from AI. Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention.

Huh.

I've been using that convention for ages, but I have to remind Claude on new projects to actually use git in the first place, and then also specifically tell it to use branches.

Then again, I was using em-dashes before they got un-cool.

I'm not sure why you're arguing that when it's not the point of the statement. YOU have been using that convention. Now do an analysis of the people at your company.

Regex the pattern over time if you want to make an argument against my supporting example.

> I'm not sure why you're arguing that when it's not the point of the statement.

'twas an expression of surprise, not an argument.

Surprise in both directions, 'cause what you like about Claude is one of the ways it fails for me.

> Now do an analysis of the people at your company.

It was mandatory at several of them.

> Regex the pattern over time if you want to make an argument against my supporting example.

I wonder which of the various employers I've had in the last decade would consider me regexing commits to be an NDA violation?

I choose not to discover.

I think this comes from Conventional Branching, https://conventionalbranch.org, inspired by conventional commits (e.g. https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/)

Closing tabs and I came back across conventionalbranch.org. I know this isn't your argument, just passing on info.

But holy heck, I really have to argue with their literal first point. All lowercase, for what reason? It's never explained why they insist on a dated convention instead of proper style.

And in what world is "feat/" abbreviation considered allowable?

I lump this in with advice from people who put their source in a src/ folder instead of Source/.

And my point is that this pattern is now more popular than it was 3 years ago. Similar to people using the phrase "load bearing".

For me, this popularity is graphable. Telling me it's a convention doesn't change that fact. I'm sorry.

> Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention.

The AI learned it from somewhere though, it didn't come up with it on its own

I've been using it at work since we moved from TF source control to TF-Git, close to a decade ago. feature/ticketno, release/number and user/initials/...

TF at least gave a nice folder view on the branches screen, which we've lost now we've moved to GitHub, but it has made it easier to enforce.

I think gitkraken is the only tool I use that presents it that way currently. It's a good convention.

I think this is just a Jira/bitbucket thing. If you add a feature branch, that's how the naming convention defaults. I've been seeing it for years.

I assumed the convention came from somewhere before AI and maybe one of the new devs brought it in from there. We also have an analyst who used em-dashes before AI ruined them, and who justifiably complains about that every so often. I'm not sure that's a trend anyone wants to pick up on.

But for branches in addition to Feature/, we're seeing Hotfix/, Modernization/, you name it. If you're parking branches for a long time without completing them, I'm 100% appreciative they're categorized.

The original git flow suggestion [0] was posted more than 15 years ago (date on the post is 2010). It didn't entirely invent the branch names/conventions from whole cloth, it was based on plenty of prior history in SVN spaces especially, which it picked up from CVS.

(Personally, for long term parked branches I prefer `{username/dev name}/` branches because then you know who the owner is without having to look at the commit log and guess based on recent commit authors. But that's the fun thing about branching conventions, there are so many to choose from, many of which have been around forever.)

[0] https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Linear does this, too. It provides a button that copies a branch name to the clipboard based on the ticket id/name.

> Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention.

People have been doing this for years.

> People have been doing this for years.

Tell me something I don't know. My point is that it's usage has seen a _measurable_ increase where I work over the last two years.

I don't think I have a single "feature/*" branch before 2024. Developer names, feature names, sure. But specifically feature/, no.

You have claimed that "last year exactly zero developers used this convention." If you choose to use hyperbole, don't be surprised when people push back.

> I don't think I have a single "feature/*" branch before 2024.

You might not, but other people have. Just because you haven't seen something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Don't assume that your personal experience is representative of the whole world of software.

Feat/ or dev-initials/ or fix/ all very common pre-ai in my companies

If you use "Feat/" at my company you will get called out. No abbreviations allowed. Capitalization matters.

But that doesn't change my argument. For me, this popularity is graphable. Telling me it's a convention doesn't change that fact. I'm sorry.

Pretty much same. We only use it for internal projects when coding and for research for all team members, not just developers.

None of your engineers use AI to develop the product? Seems hard to believe

I don't think that's what they said. They said they could remove AI from the workflow without much disruption.

>Luckily, we have no load bearing AI.

Is this a subtle joke?

You're absolutely right! Honestly? It's not just a joke, it's a smoking gun.

>Is this a subtle joke?

Proper weight distribution is critical in determining where the seams are.

I would guess that AI has given me a 30% improvement in pace? I don't know, it would feel like riding a bike on level ground instead of downhill

The effort required to do most jobs has gone down and so has the output quality. Rather than doing the same quality work with less effort, some people use LLMs to produce minimum-quality work at minimum effort.

LLMs are a cool tool but we’re over-encouraging use in every domain, even tasks they’re not good at. Every tech company in the world seems to be getting rich though how can I possibly say things would be better without it?

> and so has the output quality

Not my experience at all. The quality has gone up dramatically. Because we also use LLMs to make large scale refactorings that cleans up the code and use it to find lots of bugs that would otherwise have exploded in production at some point in time.

I just used Fable to thoroughly review a PR, and it came up with 5 "Findings that block approval".

I went through each one through the code path (a couple were already considered during implementation), and while all 5 were theoretically accurate, 0 of them were actually reachable.

I wrote them back to Claude point by point and got this back: "I checked all five claims against the code. Your list is correct on all five. I downgrade my verdict: none of the five findings blocks approval. Details and one subtlety below."

This is a usual experience with SOTA models for me and others in my team.

Don't get me wrong, I use it daily; sometimes as a crutch, other times as an accelerator, mostly as a validator/peace of mind. I however don't think that neither velocity or quality is meaningfully changed. But I do spend much more time arguing with a machine.

That is interesting. I use Opus 5 as my daily driver, and it pretty much just works.

For example, a few weeks ago I asked it to analyse my code and find duplicated code that could be extracted into reusable libraries. It found several good examples and did the refactoring. I reviewed the result, and it was 100% how I would have coded it myself.

I do almost no manual coding these days. Opus 5 just works for me.

So it is strange for me to read comments like yours saying that it doesn't work. It would be interesting to find out what makes the difference?

Me too, because I hear a lot of experiences like yours as well. It might be opinionated architecture not fitting the training norm, size of legacy repos/projects, language, or whatever else.

For what it's worth I/we do much less manual coding now too, but it almost always takes a handful of re-prompts to reach expectations.

We can do hooks to reduce superfluous comments or do a second specs-adherence pass, or write failing tests first, but other discrepancies aren't uniform enough to enforce in prompts or context.

I'd love to know the difference too. Or whether long term velocity would be higher by vibing through PRs and deal with issues when things explode or refactor down 2M lines of LLM creep after the fact.

This!! the amount of times that has happened to me in PR. A lot of the times its my fault as I haven't given the agent all of the context ( sometimes intentionally to cross check if it would reach to the same conclusion as me without additional info) but as soon as I give it all the context it would then back track on most of the blockers.

It's interesting how different your experience is from mine. I would love to find out why it works so well for me but not for you.

I use Opus 5 every day, and it just works. It is very rare that I need to do any manual editing.

Is that what's happening in _your_ company?

I’d have to stop interacting with meat proxies and wouldn’t have to read copy pasted LLM text.

I have the same feeling but don't really know why. Why do I dislike reading LLM text so much? Weird

IMO it’s because LLM text doesn’t really say anything. It’s 600% more text and paragraphs for things that could be said in 1 sentence.

It uses 50 words when 10 would do.

I don't hate it if it's text I asked for, in which case it's also easier to glance through looking for the points relevant to the topic.

I hate it if the assumption is that I'm communicating with a human, and I then get hit with a wall of text that I have to decipher the context behind. I'd rather read the prompt then.

We’d save a lot of time not sitting on calls while managers show us the results of their brainstorming sessions with Claude. Instead we could focus on making the products better again.

To be fair, if the managers are hands-on, those conversations with Claude might actually be useful.

So far, they’ve largely been a distraction. They don’t have enough domain knowledge for it to be useful, so it’s full of a bunch of stuff we don’t have and won’t buy. It also has a tendency to balloon the scope.

Personally I would be lost, because we've implemented everything around AI, more than a year ago with the assumption that models will keep getting better so the importance of building the tooling around it is capital and we've made the right choice, now close to ALL issues and features and customer requests are automatically solved.

The main issue I see is that currently managing 70 repos would just be physically impossible without re-hiring people versus like now with 8 monitors in grid and averaging 32 threads (4 per monitor) and being a bot for 10 hours a day, saturating about 20 subscriptions (mix Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Xiaomi, Minimax...) in total currently using our own tools, about $100K equivalent in token a month.

While I loved the era of before, I would genuinely be instantly depressed to go back to it knowing that the problematics have completely shifted, this isn't a 20% improvement or something, it's straight 10x increase (at least lately) and I'm quite conservative when I say 10x, people that have focused on their tooling and not use the general harnesses will understand what I mean.

I use AI daily as well to build tools for my daughter, toddler video-games, daily books... and so-on, it would be so frustrating to lose this.

I love the "IYKYK" as a kind of in joke among AI psychosis enjoyers.

I feel like ai essentially reduces the effort to both produce and parse through text.

Right now most of my day is spent thinking about what to build next. If ai is gone, a large chunk will go back to reading and writing code again!

So pretty much the same path but much slower

We're an app dev agency so we would inflate our costs and timelines by 5x and we'd never win another bid.

On which platform do you submit bids?

I generally agree that the business does not see increased productivity and revenue from AI, if it does it is small enough to be within error.

That said, if everyone (not just devs) came in and there was no AI, the org would come to a halt. AI is load-bearing in my company. Everything from dev, code reviews, planning, doc writing, ops heavily uses AI. I mean heavily, there are dev that would not know where to start triaging an alarm without the robots. Same with customer service. So much of the human capital has leaked out of peoples' brains that is fair to compare it to brain drain.

Realistically, it would be painful for 1-3 months. People would go to teams with AI. A year from now, leadership is gonna have a hard time justifying keeping the lights out.

It is akin to asking "what would happen if your company stopped using the internet(to look things up)".

I'm fairly confident our management has managed to spend more on failed or pointless AI efforts than AI could produce in benefits.

If you tell every manager they need to show some sort of success with AI, you get a lot of projects that don't make sense, which then quietly die, and the process repeats.

I think things would take longer to get done (and that’s fine for me tbh).

The main usage of AI for me is to do discovery: if I am working on service A that has a dozen other services as dependencies, then I clone all the repos, point the agent at them, and start to ask questions. I double check ofc. But without the agent I would be back to manual grep code and git logs, asking around, etc… that takes longer and you may miss things

In support, we chuck in the logs and get detailed analysis of possible problems and causes. AI based support request handling has been literally Godsend.

We would probably be fine, but much slower.

However if everyone else stopped using AI we would be broke, so please don't do that.

I have thought about this a lot. It might make us more considerate of what we're building, i think the speed at which we can mvp has made us less critical of what we output.

Hotfixes would go down by probably 50 to 60%. On a bi-weekly release rotation it was not abnormal to see 4 to 5 hot fix versions. In the past year, however, it is not uncommon to do 15 hotfix builds per release.

Productivity would go up and most people apart from 5% addicts would rejoice.

Today Claude's uptime was suffering, so did our work. Most of the early-stage startups rely on AI a lot, especially on coding agents.

I would instantly be bored.

Why have so many people turned conservative because of AI.

It's the people to lazy to use their own brain and learn a new skill that don't like AI thinking for them.

One-man show here - I own a dozen small e-commerce brands. I'll assume you're just taking away AI, but not the tools I've built with AI.

I've got all kinds of useful tools that do helpful things, like check to make sure Amazon hasn't lost a bunch of my inventory or suddenly deindexed my product from search. These sorts of things happen without warning from time to time and are trivially fixable if you catch them, but you have to be constantly monitoring 10 different things to catch anything that could go wrong in a timely fashion.

I've similarly got an inventory/cashflow management system that's deterministic that would be fine, but some of my other tools, like one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/Whatsapp/Gmail supplier convos to keep my order status board updated, is finicky. I wouldn't be able to repair that once it broke.

For some tasks, I'd have to go back to freelancers. At this point, when I take over a new brand and want to refresh images or want to A/B test new ones with an existing brand, I can do that entirely with image gen. No AI would just send me back to Upwork.

For other tasks, I'd just have to do them myself. Right now when I acquire a brand, I have a Claude skill that runs through all of the Amazon search and ads reports to find the key search terms, analyzes the text of the listing and proposes updates to make sure we're hitting the ones that matter. I used to do that myself, but it takes somewhere between 2-10 hours depending how many products we're talking about.

The biggest loss would be the inability to expand. I started out just buying Amazon-only brands because Amazon provides a crazy amount of infrastructure that enables me to run a lot of them by myself. My most recent acquisition came with a Shopify site that had minimal sales plus a Meta ad account the guy who sold me the brand had done a little experimentation with. A year ago, I would've just discarded those, since my time is the biggest bottleneck. It takes a lot of time to run your own site and Meta ads, so it makes more sense for me not to bother and instead just make more Amazon-only acquisitions.

But now I'm having a great time really pushing Claude and ChatGPT to do most of the work. I redesigned the site more or less by just having ChatGPT do research on competitors and best practices, then having Claude run with that. That took maybe eight total hours of work.

I'm spinning up an enormous amount of creative to test on Meta, and I had ChatGPT research and spec all of the kinds of landing pages that are worth trying. Claude implemented them and set up the ads using Meta's ads APIs. I got all of that done yesterday.

So yeah, basically if I couldn't use AI any more, I'd get back to the original thesis of my business, which is buying small brands at reasonable prices and operating them as leanly as possible. It still works, but it'd be a lot less fun and profitable.

Off topic, but where do you find these brands to buy?

Flippa, Empire Flippers and to a lesser degree Quiet Light Brokerage

It’s impossible now, I would need to hire more homosapiens and there is a shortage of them. I use local models, so AI is equal to human time, human brain. It’s new reality for us

There'd be a huge problem training enough replacement humans to do the work to the low standard of the retired bots. We might have to settle for a rise in the quality of work. /i

Several people would have their incompetence more visible.

this and i think a lot of "leaders" would go back to being quiet. they're quite emboldened to be in everyone's business these days seems like they're smoking a ton of "you're absolutely right to challenge engineering/architect teams here..."

God yes.

I'm finding there is now a 5 minute delay whenever I'm chatting with someone who doesn't know what the f** they are talking about thanks to AI.

Then when you get the reply at a surface level it appears very insightful to others who don't know what the f** we're talking about either – 99% of management. But obviously it's just AI slop which sounds over confident without good reason.

I'm personally trying to be more deliberate about not doing that, but I suspect the AI-induced self-confidence is actually a better way to communicate if you want people to think you're smart. There is ultimately a reason behind why LLMs get reinforced in that direction, and we all know over confident people tend to portray an unreasonable level of trust.

It's annoying though because those people previously would have shut up because and moved out of the way because they wouldn't want to make themselves look like morons. Now I have to debate with them and try to explain that they don't know what they're talking about which ultimately makes me look unreasonable – especially when I refuse to communicate in a similar overly confident way back.

'all AI', or just all LLMs/coding assistants? It would be hugely disruptive to the world if no businesses could do any machine learning any more.

No much added and nothing lost. Even my AI side project would fall back to software that works without AI enhancements.

- Code quality would go up - Code quantity would go down - Discussions online will feel normal again - Email threads will become burdersome again

We'd probably do a career change, writing blogs and aspiring to become influencers on Tiktok or something. :)

My new business would instantly die, my old business (30+ years) would barely notice; those clients ain’t going nowhere.

I'd have to do more manual work, but nothing major would happen. We don't use AI in our product at all.

Its like the agricultural revolution, once we're in, we can't go back.

I would stop coming up with sk many ideas that AI isn't great at helping me finish.

It would result in higher quality and lesser quantity which would be better for good

Honestly?

I could theoretically maintain my output, yes.

Practically nope, not because I can't do the work without AI, as much as because of burnout - both from technical (Ansible, Python - neither are a thing I like using) and social (dealing with corpospeak) reasons.

Nothing in our product runs on AI but productivity would slow down for sure.

I would cry a lot. I love my Claude Code :)

But other than that nothing really.

we would go back to building software which takes months and several engineers and ci/cd pipelines.

All our devs would lose it. They will be lost

The only thing we use large models (they are not fucking AI, never will be, and calling them that only supports the hype nonsense) for in actual production is voicing generic IVR messages and such. If we lost that we'd go back to having to record them ourselves. Whoopdeedoo.

Other than that, interacting with my boss would become less stupid (or at least be his own variety of it instead of ChatGPT's variety of stupid) and nothing meaningful would change.

Everyone who's saying that they wouldn't get anything done at all, you're already doomed and I can't wait to watch the collapse after this crap has ruined so much.

Code quality would definitely go up.

We'd just go back to business as usual: Slow change on a stupidly old tech stack that we keep getting blocked from actually moving away from due to higher-ups getting a bee in their bonnet about the latest great idea they have. As long as my check cashes I DGAF, but having the AI has made it nice.

Definitely going to impact our productivity, considering the top rank developers delivered as many as 20k loc in a day sometimes.

For me it’s OK because I deliberately reduces AI usage even for boilerplate stuffs. My daily loc is around a few hundred.

Total collapse, idiot managers already fired everyone that knew how anything worked and now they're completely fucked. Frankly I have no idea how I've managed to hang on this long but likely to be gone myself in a few weeks as well.

Just curious, chaos and morality aside, the company finances are doing better or worse?

If it were just my company and not the whole industry for some newly discovered reason/vulnerability, I would quit because leadership has gone retarded.

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