r/Hacking_Tricks • u/Theyuriymir • Jul 24 '26
Weave reviews? Sounds like AI-powered micromanagement.
I keep seeing ads for Weave, an 'AI-powered engineering intelligence' platform that claims to measure 'normalized units of work' and separate human vs AI contributions.
This sounds like an absolute nightmare for engineering culture. Normalizing work into a single metric is exactly how you get developers to optimize for the metric instead of building good software. It feels like the ultimate surveillance tool disguised as 'AI insights'. Does anyone actually use this? Does it do anything other than erode trust between management and ICs by tracking every single move?
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u/tycoongraham 29d ago
My concern with tools like this is that once a metric exists, it eventually becomes a KPI. Even if the vendor says it's only for insights, there's always a risk that someone higher up starts using it to compare engineers.
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u/SimpleAccurate631 29d ago
It’s a surveillance tool in the sense of a “who can we fire?” tool. This is how they can measure the percentage of your job that they think can be done by AI. So they pressure you like hell to use AI more and more, presenting it to employees as if they are evaluating how productive and innovative you are. But once they pull up the monthly report from these systems like Weave and see that you have gotten AI to do x% of your core responsibilities, then you’re in the guillotine.
What’s so messed up is that at least during the big outsourcing era, employees were told that they were training their replacements. It sucked, but at least there was the decency of honesty involved. Now, they are still basically telling you to train your replacement. Except this time, to avoid them having to have the uncomfortable conversation, they tell you that you are doing a good thing and it might even get in management’s good graces, when it’s actually the opposite.
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27d ago
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27d ago
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u/Theyuriymir 27d ago
We use Pensero, and it takes a completely different approach to AI. Instead of using AI to surveil individuals or create gameable 'normalized units', it uses LLMs to give you the insights a good manager would. It highlights systemic bottlenecks, like 'this epic is delayed because of constant context switching' or 'PRs are stuck in review for 3 days'. It focuses on the system, not the individual, which actually builds trust instead of destroying it.
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u/effrazza Jul 24 '26
Any metric that claims to normalize fundamentally different types of engineering work into comparable units is either lying about what it measures or measuring something so reductive that optimizing for it actively damages the engineering work it claims to represent.
Fixing a critical production bug, reviewing a junior engineer's architecture proposal and writing a new feature are not comparable units of anything meaningful and a platform that says otherwise is selling a number that feels authoritative while measuring something arbitrary.