It's very interesting that this has become such a dichotomy.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
The enthusiasts are founders, executives and investors who don’t actually have to use AI to build products and therefore have a somewhat distant opinion about its real capabilities but will capture all gains from AI. They only build prototypes and rough drafts and don’t understand that AI makes the first 80% easier and the last 20% harder, and makes maintainability a nightmare where a codebase that’s gone through vibe coding for 3 months is like the equivalent of a 10 year old legacy codebase.
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
I am both. I am shipping multiple working projects per week in my hobby. It is liberating to have my own virtual dev team.
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
Because it writes garbage and I would like to understand how something actually works instead of deferring my brain to a machine? Might as well live in an iron lung.
Similar here. At home, I have a hobby, I know what I want to do, and the AI allows me to achieve it much faster.
At work, everything is chaotic, the people who make the key decisions do not understand their consequences, and the AI allows this chaos to happen much faster. On top of that, meaningless restrictions, for example only the managers are allowed to use the AI to search for information on SharePoint, the developers are only allowed to use it inside of their IDEs.
Ironically, it would be possible to use the AI to do things much better in my company. For example, there is a key component that is full of bugs, it would be much better to throw it away and vibecode a replacement in one week. But that's not going to happen, because someone very important in the company management has approved the purchase of that component. So instead, the remaining parts of the system must be tweaked to accommodate for its bugs... these days with the help of AI. It does not help that AI writes code, if humans make spaghetti architecture.
I am wondering how many devs are putting time bombs in code with AI's help. If I was at the top of the corp pyramid, I'd tell the devs to fix up all bugs and let go everyone except for a skeleton crew. Boom, profit. I mean, what is there left to build? A better Jira? /s
NichoPaolucci · · focus · HN ↗
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
an0malous · · focus · HN ↗
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
snarfy · · focus · HN ↗
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
72deluxe · · focus · HN ↗
snarfy · · focus · HN ↗
someguynamedq · · focus · HN ↗
72deluxe · · focus · HN ↗
Viliam1234 · · focus · HN ↗
At work, everything is chaotic, the people who make the key decisions do not understand their consequences, and the AI allows this chaos to happen much faster. On top of that, meaningless restrictions, for example only the managers are allowed to use the AI to search for information on SharePoint, the developers are only allowed to use it inside of their IDEs.
Ironically, it would be possible to use the AI to do things much better in my company. For example, there is a key component that is full of bugs, it would be much better to throw it away and vibecode a replacement in one week. But that's not going to happen, because someone very important in the company management has approved the purchase of that component. So instead, the remaining parts of the system must be tweaked to accommodate for its bugs... these days with the help of AI. It does not help that AI writes code, if humans make spaghetti architecture.
stasomatic · · focus · HN ↗