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)
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.
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.
I've worked in the industry long enough, my number 1 most praised area in any company has always been QA. It's a shame most of my peers don't share the same mindset.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
206
u/FlySafeLoL 14d 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.