Bonus panel:
There’s a push to use it in my office. Specifically to hopefully reduce the number of people we need to review cases and code them appropriately.
Ooooh they said, Ai can totally do that!
Then in the most recent meeting, it changed to “Ai will give the clerk a summary and recommendation!” So we aren’t reducing the number of clerks, and they’ll just follow whatever the Ai says rather than checking the cases themselves. Just another thing to train them on and have go wrong.
In the interest of pleasing my bosses, the research is continuing, but I have little hope it’s going to be helpful. I talked them out of giving the text to the clerk, but instead save the recommendation and see how it matches up to the clerk. Then it’s at least a fair test.
He immediately threatens her job. Classy.
And realistic!
It’s an automated response
At our wor k they have a big push for everyone to use AI. I used AI to try to do things faster, it’s terrible in it. The time you save with it in the beginning because it helps you rubberducking you and your peers lose at the end by finding out late that it bullshitted and contradicted itself and you copy and pasted it to be faster. I have so many examples of it.
They enabled some AI in Outlook for some of us as beta testers. You write a few words with the basic idea of the mail and it bullshits it into a full page full of nonsense with your initial words “summarized” in some bullet points most of the times
Then when you receive one of those emails it can summarize it into just a few words
We are truly living in the future!
That is what drives me crazy. Society had largely gotten over the ‘write stupidly verbose crap for the sake of professionalism’ and that’s like the first thing they want to bring back. Send me the stuff you would have fed to the LLM, if I want LLM to expand on it, I’ll ask it. I don’t need to wade through a bunch of pointless padding words to figure out what your damn point was.
There’s a new person on one of the teams I work with who is really formal in email and messaging, I wonder if this is why
Go back, and correct each example. One by one. Now a 2 hour manual job takes all week with AI.
Then when your boss asks why you aren’t using AI to make things faster, you tell him “Well I DID use AI. It completed the job in 5 minutes. Now I’m just checking for all of it’s errors. For example, this contract had your vendors paying you in corn. I had to go back and correct that. Unless you DO want me to just use AI, spend 5 minutes, and we use our entire team on this project for you to be paid in corn…”
I have a feeling that AI will be cancelled pretty quick.
I have a feeling that AI will be cancelled pretty quick.
I thought so too, but ChatGPT was released more than 2 years ago and people still seem to give its “opinion” weight…
A disturbing number of people think that computers are magic* and therefore whatever comes out of them is automatically not only correct, but the best possible form of correct.
And if they pay money for access to something that runs on a computer, most of them will double down on that belief until it ruins them.
* or logical, or mathematical or some other grand attribute. “Infallible” is a good one.
And you’ll get people in high sales and marketing places who know it’s a fallacy, successfully con others with it, but also fall victim to it when it comes from outside their sphere of influence.
Humans™: We’re really not all that far from flinging our faeces at each other.
I love PowerShell but I use it so infrequently that I’m constantly relearning the syntax.
If I need a quick script to scrape date from a system and update a runbook, asking ChatGPT to give me a PowerShell command that pipes the output to excel saves me hours.
For writing small simple functions in an unfamiliar language, it is an absolute godsend. Makes IT way easier.
For anything else it’s worthless.
There’s one other use case I love - i ask it to interview me or challenge me on my ideas. It can sometimes ask questions that cause me to rethink things. But in the end, I’m still the one doing the work. It’s my advanced rubber duck.
Though then have to be careful. I had a requirement to implement a security feature in an unfamiliar language. I gave it a shot and upon reviewing the output, if the code had worked as it wrote it, then it would have had a gaping security hole a mile wide making things worse than they already were, and the bit needed to implement the security was a waste of time. In this case, two wrongs made a right, as it also hallucinated some functions that didn’t exist so the code wouldn’t have even built.
I can see LLM integrated into the IDE maybe providing a quicker entry to some very obvious logic, but it’s a careful UI consideration in terms of balancing offering helpful capabilities versus making the user undo a bunch of times when it was in fact not helpful.
This is just Advanced Intellisence, something Visual Studio already supports. And again - that’s totally fine. I appreciate an occasional “Did you realize you don’t actually use that declared variable anywhere? Here, let me make that code more legible for you.” coding assist.
But you’re not getting an end-to-end automation of a Full Stack Development job and it was crazy to think you would.
Note that I would imagine it as a bit more, like recognizing a pattern where you are going to want to iterate over some iterable and do something super common, I could see an LLM managing to do that better than something like current code completion solutions can. Could also extend it in ways not normally feasible. For example, use something like golang and the IDE can do crazy amounts of completion because so much is specified. In a more loose scenario like javascript or python, the traditional approach can do… some, but a lot more gaps appear since things are too open ended for those approaches to work.
The thing I cited was like a 12 line function that I figured it would get right. But it failed and hallucinated. I had to resort to like result 7 or 8 in an internet search before someone offered a correct solution, so it’s still matching my LLM experience so far, not any better than blindly clicking the first search result and hoping for the best. It can handle some token swap out compared to a traditional copy/paste, but ultimately you are best served by finding the most well maintained library to offload if it’s not something you really need to write yourself.
Yeah, if used correctly it’s awesome. You have to be proficient enough in what you do to catch its bullshit though. Currently getting back into coding and learning Python syntax. It’s awesome for that, however there also has been a few moments when it confidently wrote complete bullshit.
It’s basically like a talking, semi context-aware search engine. Don’t make it generate big stuff though.
![AI [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1740504999-20250225.png){kind=link}