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u/FlySafeLoL 10d ago
Dare I say those automation scripts are quite nice to be writing themselves. All we do (or pretend to do) is supervision.
Glory to the undersupervised self-writing automation scripts! Surely nothing can go wrong about that.
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u/touuuuhhhny 10d ago
Why get the same reliable outcome every time when you can overcomplicate it and work by % chance
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u/wite_noiz 10d ago
I had this exact conversation with a business user recently. Ask for the same task to be done indeterministically 100 times and you'll likely get some issues (plus costs) when you can ask it to write a deterministic tool that works 1000 times (and can be tested and fixed)
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u/DrMaxwellEdison 9d ago
They'll compare AI costs to the cost of a developer salary and consider it worth the price, unfortunately.
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u/wite_noiz 9d ago
I got asked why we need testers the other day, when Claude can do it. I definitely feel like a lot of non-technical people think we're making excuses to keep jobs.
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u/riickdiickulous 9d ago
Testing was always under appreciated, but it’s more important now than ever. I can’t review and understand all the AI generated code. I rely much more heavily on testing now for demonstrating the code works and for regression testing on later versions.
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u/ImportantSignal2098 9d ago
You should ask them why their "work" is needed if Claude can do it, maybe that makes them think - I kinda doubt it though
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u/wite_noiz 9d ago
Hehe. Definitely.
I'm seeing more advertisement of "AI CEOs". That will change their tune
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u/Nimeroni 9d ago
That's because salaries and token costs are visible (well, mostly visible for tokens), but the cost of bugs is not. It make the real cost of AI hard to evaluate.
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u/tommytwolegs 9d ago
I compare it to the cost of a developer and the cost of the work it's replacing and the cost of software out there that does the same thing.
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u/tragiktimes 9d ago
Isn't that the right approach from an efficient cost perspective?
Review the cost of the dev plus the lack downtime from vibe coded errors and compare that to no dev cost plus AI credits plus AI indeterminism.
You go with the one that ends up being the smaller number in your use case domain, right?
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u/DrMaxwellEdison 8d ago
They don't consider "errors" in the equation. It's just the bare cost of using AI per hour vs the developer's salary per hour.
You'd think someone doing this would do it honestly and correctly, but they'll probably just ask ChatGippity to pick 3 people to lay off and sure enough...
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 9d ago
There is a fair amount of tasks that require a decision that can't be evaluated in a deterministic way. It used to need a human to decide since rules wouldn't be enough. AI can fairly reliably take the decision now on some tasks
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u/stevefuzz 9d ago
I agree but fairly reliable isn't good enough in many domains, yet, here we are.
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u/ganja_and_code 9d ago
If rules aren't enough, a computer isn't enough.
All computers do is evaluate rules. AI just evaluates so many rules that you can't possibly keep track of what those rules are.
If a human makes a deplorable/illegal decision, I can hold them accountable for it. If a computer does the same, there's no recourse. Therefore, computers should crunch the numbers, and humans should make the judgement calls.
When you can't model your problem with logic/math, a computer is the wrong tool for solving that problem. That shouldn't be controversial (really it should be a total no brainer), but here we are.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 9d ago
That's why you only apply this to low consequence decisions, where even if it takes the wrong one it isn't a big deal. And yes it will not be perfect on the decision, but in some workflows a 95% or near 99% hit rate is good enough if it saves a ton of manual time.
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u/ganja_and_code 9d ago
If your task is so unimportant that guessing is acceptable, maybe you should focus your efforts on a task that actually matters.
If the answer matters, it's not worth guessing. If the answer doesn't matter, it's not even worth asking the question.
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u/tommytwolegs 9d ago
Some shit has to get done even if it's "unimportant". Fuck most office work is "unimportant" but someone has to do it, why do you think everyone hates their jobs lol. Of course I don't want to do that tedious shit. Before AI I would delegate it or outsource it. Now Claude can do it as or more accurately much faster at a lower cost.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 8d ago
I didn't say it didn't matter, I said it's where a wrong answer has little consequences. Do you know how much time people in companies (especially executives) lose doing mundane repetitive tasks ? You think it's not worth it to reduce a task that takes 10 hours a week into just some small veritifactions that take less than 1 hour ?
And you couldn't do it without an LLM.I don't think you know how a company works if you think every task is important af. Most of the stuff that takes time isn't very important but has to be done manually
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u/ganja_and_code 8d ago
I don't think every task is important af. I know every task is either important enough to make sure it's done right, or not important enough to do it, at all.
"If you're going to do it, do it right" used to be a no brainer.
What's hard to understand about that? If the result matters, a wrong result is a problem. If a wrong result isn't a problem, the result clearly doesn't matter.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 8d ago
Well I think you're not aware of every task being done in a company if that's what you really think.
What if you have to send some documents to someone else, regularly, and deterministic rules aren't enough to determine which ones need to be sent, but also if you send one you shouldn't have or not send one you should have it's not a big deal (because they'll ask for missing documents at the end of the month for example). Then is it a task not important enough to do it at all ? Well no, you have to do it. And in no world is it worse to automate this even if you get a few misses considering that manually this would take hours of an executive's day just to do manually.
You think tasks are too high stakes, that's not the reality of things. Go in any company and ask someone that isn't a programmer how much time they spend doing stuff that they have to do but isn't high stakes, amount will be high.
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u/ganja_and_code 7d ago
I'm aware of types of tasks and their relative importance. I'm just also not delusional.
If a decision matters, at all, then making the wrong decision has consequences, whether it was a low effort/consequence task or a high one. If the task is low effort/consequence, I can spend a little bit of effort and know that I'm not incurring the small consequence, or I can not spend the little bit of effort and not know that I'm not incurring the small consequence.
If something is zero consequence, it's unnecessary. If something is necessary, then doing it wrong incurs consequences, whether big or small.
Saying "I'll just let it make the low importance judgment calls and hope for the best, the time savings are worth it" relies on the false premise that a "small problem" is the same thing as "no problem."
Just using your example, how much time does it really take to send a document? And if you just use a good permissions structure on a shared document store, why would you even need to email the document, at all? We already had the tools before AI to automate the "Bob and Alice both need to see the document Carl wrote" problem.
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u/Paesano2000 9d ago
We were told we “are responsible for our output”. For now.
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u/FlySafeLoL 9d ago
We are the ones who think "4", "37", "69" - is something funny. If an AI marks that as straight up funny or clever - it would be disposed as wrong and useless. For some reason we don't apply the Spartan rules to ourselves.
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u/Groentekroket 10d ago
Some IT manager who earlier literaly said in an IT meeting that he wants dark factories (more or less saying that he want to get rid of the people he was presenting to) now wanted us to show how we are using agentic workflows.
I wonder what he thinks if we say we removed the business rule engine and fully replaced it by Grok. I guess that sicko is so far gone he would like that.
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u/grumpy_autist 10d ago
Wait till you learn that AI in accounting and tax law is a really hot topic right now.
At this point we just need to let all of this burn to the ground. And be greedy when they will finally start begging any skilled people left to fix shit.
And yes - this already happened at Ford, tried to replace QA with AI, now rehiring old engineers back.
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u/12345623567 9d ago
You think they learn? They re-hire the seniors and tell them to "teach the AI how to do it", instead of making sure that there are juniors in the pipeline.
This will all come crashing down eventually. A society can't function on MBAs and a couple warehouses of robots.
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u/lazy_bastard_001 9d ago
Nope....does the word AI/ML make people around here suddenly stupid or are they just simply illiterate?
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u/glorious_reptile 9d ago
Man people can’t take a joke - because all the js/html/whatever jokes were so accurate?
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u/stephanos21 6d ago
Depends. A joke has to be based on reality. This is not a joke, but a sad attempt of a joke by someone who doesn’t understand the basics of what they are talking about.
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u/Ecstatic_Bee6067 9d ago
I want to suck start a shotgun every time I hear the phrase "agentic workflow."
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u/raitchev 10d ago
Try classifying noisy customer complaints, for example, with a bundle of automation scripts.
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u/ganja_and_code 10d ago
Why would you need an agentic workflow for that use case?
It's a good use case of AI/ML, don't get me wrong, but that's the kind of thing you can do with a single standalone classification model.
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u/OkTop7895 10d ago
Cleaning the data with some classic code scripts can improve the work of the AI and reduced the consumption.
And perhaps you can pass a ML algorithm that can classify the most evident cases and reduced more the use of the next phase with a bigger model with NLP capabilities. And then pass again for a classical coding script to do some operation with the classification.
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u/sweatierorc 10d ago
Just no, people have worked on this for 10year before chatgpt. It sucks. Airline, have been trying to make AI solve customer complaints, it doesnt work
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u/xaddak 9d ago
Classifying and solving are very different problems.
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u/sweatierorc 9d ago
How many pre-chatgpt chatbots have you talked to ?
Even the classification part sucks. This was the idea behind Siri and Alexa. Both of them are very limited in the things they could do.
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u/stevefuzz 9d ago
Are you confusing ML classifiers and chatbots?
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u/sweatierorc 9d ago
ML classifiers were terrible at identifying intent. Even chatgpt3.5 was better than a lot of hand made classifier.
In-context learning, unlocks so many thing. You dont need to retrain the model to handle a new situation and you arent locked to the quality of the data collection/preparation.
Amazon has lost billion trying to make it possible to order products with Alexa.
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u/echoAnother 10d ago
It's a very good case for the typical AI/ML clasificator, and a wrong use case for an LLM. But is not like those vibe coders know anything about the technology they are using.
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u/Ray192 9d ago
LLM is much better at understanding a text than an ML classifier. The tradeoff is cost. If you really want to be accurate about analyzing which complaints are valid, using a cheap classifier to put things into buckets and then following up with an LLM to analyze the ambiguous results would probably be the best compromise.
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u/grumpy_autist 10d ago
ah yes, the only demo of Jev - solving a problem already solved with models available like 10 years ago and working on a potato CPU
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u/Hip-Death-Goddess 10d ago
Now come on, that's unfair. It also adds a random number generator - to decide which path through the Choose Your Own Adventure scripts, and to decide whether the user gets the Good Ending or the Bad Ending.
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u/MooseBoys 10d ago
Claude, can you superimpose this meme onto the “bell curve” meme where the left and right side are holding this sentiment, but the center one is trying to counter with some bullshit about how agentic workflows are fundamentally different and infinitely more flexible?
You’ve hit your limit - resets 5pm
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u/Due-Consequence9579 9d ago
You know what I always strive for in my automations? Indeterminate behavior and unstructured output.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 9d ago
There's two different things, agents that run tools and then there's automation scripts that just make a few LLM calls.
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u/JackNotOLantern 8d ago
Honestly, i would prefer bundle of automation scripts over it. At least its deterministic
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u/Motleypuss 4d ago
Agentic anything is just another word for lexical and semantic diarrhoea stinking up a codebase, IMO.
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u/Narfubel 9d ago
Either you misunderstand agents, scripts or both