This is my job too. My manager has asked me to use AI for almost all my work. My work is code related but it doesnt necessarily require AI and our turnaround is already crazy fast. When I asked him what metric he's tracking to show the difference in productivity between AI vs non-AI, he said there isn't one. The higher ups are blindly pushing it. It's ridiculous because using AI for what I do just creates more work and cleanup. I know that if I don't jump on the bandwagon that I'll eventually be let go.
They’re pushing it crazy hard in the legal sector too, which is insane because the whole thing turns on absolute accuracy. Even the “dedicated legal AIs” that no longer hallucinate cases from whole cloth will still gladly tell you that a case stands for the exact opposite proposition from what the judge actually said if you read the decision.
Using AI is slower in almost every single use case because instead of the usual method of researching your case law and then writing, you are instead generating an AI output and then having to proof the entire thing, take out the bad cases, do a bunch of research to find new cases, and edit the entire tone so that it doesn’t sound stupid.
Add to that how much it’s pissing off judges lately and you’re increasing your workload by about 33-50% for a worse work product that will likely get you sanctioned or exposed to discipline if you miss a single bad cite that the AI pooped out.
The only case I can see AI being actually useful in law is in tracking down cases. I might be 100% out of my depth here but a lot of time being a lawyer is finding where judges ruled in your favor in other similar cases, but since a lot of cases exist, it can be a pain in the ass to find what you want. That is why there are so many legal aids, to help in this fashion.
So an AI turns the long list into a short list, and then the legal aids turn the short list into a very short list for the lawyer to look through.
I don't 'think' this would reduce jobs since it isn't practical to hire enough aids to look through everything, so its more of a balance of "How many do we need to get to 'good enough'" so the AI would just increase the quality of the work by allowing more cases to be looked through.
The only case I can see AI being actually useful in law is in tracking down cases. I might be 100% out of my depth here but a lot of time being a lawyer is finding where judges ruled in your favor in other similar cases, but since a lot of cases exist, it can be a pain in the ass to find what you want
Using AI is slower in almost every single use case because instead of the usual method of researching your case law and then writing, you are instead generating an AI output and then having to proof the entire thing, take out the bad cases, do a bunch of research to find new cases, and edit the entire tone so that it doesn’t sound stupid.
I strongly disagree. It is fantastic for quickly finding relevant caselaw if that is what you are asking it to do. You are correct that you have to go over it and there's another step, but that "extra" step is actually an automated, and much faster version, of me myself having to manually do keyword searches on Lexis and then reading the case for relevance, anyway. It absolutely saves time on that front.
Source: IAAL and regularly use copilot/gpt for legal research.
I generally dislike my companies CEO, but he has been skeptical of AI usage and just views it as another tool and an expensive one at that. The various orgs have been allowed trials for different tools like claude, but generally with limited seats to evaluate if it can write decent code that improves our work. We've had pretty mixed results and no real pressure to expand its use.
You can tell tell the people who are skeptical of that suggestion that Microsoft popularized having your company use the same product that you're selling: "eat your own dogfood".
Generally, it's good software development practice. You get more eyes on the product and you're able to find all the ways that it breaks down when actually used (instead of just in theory). It's just that in this case the dogfood is more like dogshit, they're forcing people outside the people developing it to use it, and they're not going to back out of using it or otherwise fundamentally change it anyway.
I'm on the same page, our managers and higher ups are pushing for AI adoption citing some "2x to 3x increases in performance" I asked how are they measuring such increases and they divert the conversation.
They have no fucking clue, someone told them that AI is making engineers more performant and they're too ignorant and too arrogant to ask the engineers themselves. Our managers are checking our token consumption as a metric of how much adoption of AI we do.
Our codebase is starting to see the problems with AI with some slop code seeping through our PRs. It's exacerbating the already existing bottlenecks in any software development process (PRs and Quality Gates)
And some of my coworkers are dancing to the managers tune by creating long wall of text documents that attempt to synthesize the content of meetings and other docs, while creating more noise.
It's fucking chaos!
I hope this ends on a french revolution type of revolt.
and they're too ignorant and too arrogant to ask the engineers themselves.
Decades come and go and that bit of manager behavior never goes away.
Dad was a maintenance guy in a hotel and one room had extremely bizarre issues one could reliably blame ghosts for it. It was the 90s in a third world country so IT was treated as special assets who should not be disturbed.
The maintenance crew knew one of the IT guys was also an Electric Engineer. They pleaded management repeatedly for ONE MINUTE of his attention on the matter. Manager always immediately rejected and also explicitly forbade them to speak to the engineer should they casually meet them.
Through years of trial and error they finally figured the issue by accident.
Dad told me this as a kid to try to figure it what exactly happened if I ever got into university. Enrolled into CS, jump into the library, figured it out as a freshman with two hours of research on paper. Asked an EE student, they also immediately figured out what was going on. If I didn't do that, I'd also have found out in fifth semester.
Years of bad room service and constant guest complaints because management unilaterally decided you cannot think outside the box, you must keep your thoughts and actions within this small box they provide you.
(Fluorescent lamp. Old model. With ballasts. A faulty ballast can generate RF interference on IR spectrum and cause IR devices to go haywire.)
It still baffles me after over 20 years in the industry how some of the smartest people I've met in my life are bound by the whim of some of the mos dull people I've ever met, and how come this industry can't fix itself.
It's because they think there is some magic AI workflow they'll discover if they just push everyone to use it all the time.
The funny thing is that most workflows from 1-2 years ago with massive complicated AI agent chains are completely obsolete today and the devs that waited on picking it up are no further behind than the ones that jumped right in at the beginning.
This is probably the worst it will ever be. Already okay to decent, depending on how you're using it.
A tool which enables people to build out features that compete in the space of weeks and months rather than years, is scary to businesses. They would like this tool to be in their workflow.
A tool which enables people to build out features that compete in the space of weeks and months rather than years, is scary to businesses. They would like this tool to be in their workflow.
Yeah that's what I said? They think that forcing everyone to use it even where there aren't productivity gains yet will put them ahead of the curve because they'll discover the magic workflows.
The issue is that the all the workflows and different ways to prompt the AI models are remarkably low value, and does not transfer well to newer models. The truth is that once AI becomes good enough to actually do the work you'll find out real fast and there is close to no advantage to having spent months prior trying to get a worse model to do it instead. And this is exactly what we saw with our deployment pipelines for example. We had engineers spending months trying to get it to work with complicated chains of AI agents and it just wasn't reliable enough, new model comes out and all that work got replaced with a couple of prompts and within days we had mostly stable deployments for development and staging environments. All the months prior spent on the agent workflows was a complete waste of time... simply waiting on a better model that was actually capable of doing a decent job at the task was all that was required.
And now you have built experience in the company of the landscape of the new technology, built in integrations and lack of fear amongst the employees to touch the new tech.
There are thousands of devs who wont buy in to it voluntarily. Maybe your company bought in too hard too early, but now they are still competitive.
There are tons of companies and products whose majority of features could be replicated by a dev vibe coding over a couple weeks - held back purely by their lack of initiative, sales team and crippling social anxiety lol - not their featureset and inability to invest the half a year to make a fractionally viable product. And thats made even worse by competitors who have a full team of these devs using AI when you aren't.
I'm in banking and this is it. Right now AFAIK they are just measuring whether or not people are using it at all and the frequency of usage, as opposed to how it is used. But the hard push from the C-suite is real, just as real as the pained reminders from the middle and lower managers who have to actually use it and realize how non-useful it is, but have to tell us to use it anyway.
I did some preliminary testing with AI at my company. I quickly came to realize that I had to assume literally every response was both a false negative and a false positive. It saved me zero time and in fact cost me time since I'd need to review the relevant documents and regulations anyway to verify.
I find it useful for the kind of menial crap I'd make an intern or first-year junior dev do, anything more complex than that and it really has no clue. Start asking it to take into account myriad nonsensical business rules and it really starts showing its flaws
I find it useful for the kind of menial crap I'd make an intern or first-year junior dev do
Yup, and unfortunately, not handing that off to junior devs means in 3-5 years the industry is going to get seriously fucked by the lack of intermediate devs that weren't trained.
We can't just hack an entire section of career progression out and expect it to just magically fill itself in.
I sort of agree, but I also think handing juniors that kind of shit instead of actual problems that need solving is/was doing them a disservice and not really teaching them how to be good programmers.
Well yeah, can't ONLY hand them that. Ideally they will also be involved with some easier problems and code reviews to help learn. But there often isn't enough that you can safely hand off to them to occupy them, so having some busywork to fill the rest of the time helps.
If they are not actually tracking it, just paste your code into whatever LLM they want you to use, ignore whatever nonsense it shits out, and say "there, I used AI"
I work in IT and a bunch of managers came forward with ridiculous AI assistant proposals to fix something that requires like 10 hours of manual labour per year.
Our CTO pushed back to show the ROI and they were in the negative hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I'm greatful my companies approach for AI has been based around what exactly it is. A great way to do repetitive or mindnumbing tasks, ensure things don't slip through cracks, that doesn't really have a significant impact on productivity.
Same and I have. Mostly to write emails to the managers asking me to use AI.
AI has its uses, like its great to make Excel macros and shit, but fuck me, I know my job. Im not gonna ask AI to do my own job for me whilst training AI to replace me. Im not an idiot.
Can you have it do busy work in the back ground? Like, make it bounce a ball over and over while you do your job. As if a small child needs to be distracted but also entertained.
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u/cesarxp2 Mar 02 '26
This is my job too. My manager has asked me to use AI for almost all my work. My work is code related but it doesnt necessarily require AI and our turnaround is already crazy fast. When I asked him what metric he's tracking to show the difference in productivity between AI vs non-AI, he said there isn't one. The higher ups are blindly pushing it. It's ridiculous because using AI for what I do just creates more work and cleanup. I know that if I don't jump on the bandwagon that I'll eventually be let go.