Thread

1. zero_shift · 1790612953 · focus · HN ↗

   I was reflecting on this on Saturday in an unformed way, trying to trace the lineage of a decision made at work.

   The code change itself doesn't specifically matter. But suffice to say, it was about an AI feature in one of our products.

   The code was stamped by Claude driven by a prompt. The prompt was for a ticket generated with the Atlassian AI integration. Atlassian had digested docs made with AI. The docs came from strategy memos I'm 90% sure were written entirely by Claude.

   The strategy was chosen by management at the urging of exec leadership. The execs now communicate mostly via AI written memos. I do not know how they make decisions, but they reference tech influencers, market conditions, customer expectations.

   This gave me pause. Who had actually made the decision then? Arguably there has been several layers of human review, but the actual source of the decision was hard to pin down.

   We were not building the feature because we wanted it. We were building it because we thought other people expected it.

   Perhaps reflecting on the state of the market, I thought, could indicate who was actually in control.

   Where do investor and customer expectations come from in 2026? It is very murky, at least in tech. There appears to be hype. Some hype comes from true believers, some comes from cynics. But both respond to market incentives that reward bigger and bigger claims.

   Where does the market's "action" come from? What is the driver?

   Investors do not really seem to understand what the tech is or its limitations. Some are passive operators. Others are just responding to the overall froth and speculation in the market - which becomes a runaway feedback cycle.

   This left me lost.

   Nobody in this ecosystem, I thought, is actually in control here.

   Nobody is actually orienting work and action to real, concrete goals. It's all based on speculation and anxiety about the future.

   So it is not only that nobody understands what the code does. It is that we cannot, or at least I cannot, explain the motivation. There doesn't seem to "be" any form of "intention" in this environment.

   It has all been hollowed out, replaced either be inscrutable machines, or inscrutable incentives.

   Ironically it rather resembles the kind of "misaligned" superintelligence we are supposed to be avoiding.

   1. ashleyn · 1790614243 · focus · HN ↗

      Anecdotally, I know people in the industry who tell me their job is "so easy" now because all they need to do is be a meat proxy for claude and take home the paycheck.

      Question from someone written in AI? Just answer it in AI and send it back. What was it actually about - who cares? Bug comes in? Post the jira link in claude and don't even bother prompting anything else. If something critically breaks - well, eh, we'll deal with it then. FIRE (early retirement), a prediction their layoff is inevitable, and investing aggressively so you can finally escape actually working are often invoked in the same breath. Everyone feels like they're just trying to punch the drywall and grab as much copper wire out of the walls as they can until they're finally let go and/or the whole company fails.

      There's a great deal of nihilism and cynicism in the industry currently, and it feels like LLMs are just greatly enabling it. Where you would've done a halfassed job previously, you'd now do an unchecked AI job.

      1. otikik · 1790616804 · focus · HN ↗

         > Everyone feels like they're just trying to punch the drywall and grab as much copper wire out of the walls as they can until they're finally let go and/or the whole company fails

         That’s very graphic.

         The thing is, I already felt a bit like that before AI. It’s just money. This quarter’s. The rest doesn’t exist. Make flashy features faster and you’ll be promoted. Make things carefully so that they last and can be maintained easily, and you are be ignored.

         I say this not as an engineer that tried to write maintainable software and now is butthurt, but as an (ex)manager who tried to promote such people. And now is butthurt. I found myself telling my engineers that if they wanted to get promotions they had to prioritize the shiny and skip the rest.

         I hated it.

         Now I am back to Engineering. I do use AI heavily at work because no one cares but if my output is “too slow” I will look bad. I at least try to raise concerns when I see them. The answer tends to be “yeah, we can’t afford to do that properly now”.

         I use AI way more sparingly for my personal open source stuff. Because I care.

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