Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
AI as it exists today is only effective if used sparingly and cautiously by someone with domain knowledge who can identify the tasks (usually menial ones) that don't need a human touch.
AI now offers to post my ads for me on Kijiji. I provide pictures and it has been accurate on price, condition, category and description. I have a lot of shit to sell and was dreading it, but this use removes the biggest barrier for me getting it done.
Even helped me figure out some things I was struggling to find online for reference. Saved me at least an hour of tedium yesterday.
Excellent use case.
This 1000x. I am a PHP developer, I found out about two months ago that the AI assistant is included in my Jetbrains subscription (All pack, it was a separate thing before). And recently found about Junie, their AI agent that has deep thinking (or whatever the hell it is called). I tried it the same day to refactor part of my test that had to migrated to stop using a deprecated function call.
To my surprise, it required only very minor changes, but what would've taken me about 3 hours was done in half an hour. What I also liked was that it actually asked if it can run a terminal command to verify thr test results and it went back and fixed a broken test or two.
Finally I have faith in AI being useful to programmers.
For a test, I took our dev exam (for potential candidates) and just sent it to see what it does just based on the document, and besides a few mistakes it even used modern tools and not some 5 year old stuff (like PSR standards) and implemented core systems by itself using well known interfaces (from said PSRs). I asked it to change Dependency Injection to use Symfony DI instead of the self-made thing, and it worked flawlessly.
Of course, the code has to be reviewed or heavily specified to make sure it does what it is told to, but all in all it doesn't look like just a gimmick anymore.
Absolutely, this matches my experience. I think this is also the experience of most coders who willingly use AI. I feel bad for the people who are forced to use it by their companies. And those who are laid off because of C-levels who think AI is capable of replacing an experienced coder.
it doesn't look like just a gimmick anymore.
It still does 😞
The biggest point is that you must be an expert in the field you are using it in. I rarely get fooled by hallucinations and stupid bugs because they are glaringly obvious to me. The best use case is having the llm write code for using a library that has poor documentation, that am going to use once, and I am too lazy to learn. These tools are scary when used by juniors, they are creating more work for everyone by using llms to code. I just imagine myself using this when I was a fresh grad, it is terrifying. It would have only been one step up from vibe coding.
I feel so bad for recent grads. First COVID then AI/LLMs, it's such a bad time to be starting out. I feel so fortunate that I'm well into my career and can use AI responsibly without having to worry too much about it.
may well be a Gell-Mann amnesia simulator when used improperly.
Some good examples from the bookkeeping/accounting industry is automating the matching of payments to the invoices and using AI to extract and process invoices.
This is the best description of current AI I've seen so far.
In the situation outlined, it can be pretty effective.
As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
EDIT: Since my comment has gained a lot of traction I've marked down peoples user names and portfolios/emails to my dev list. If something more comes up (and trust me, it will) I'll shoot you an email or msg on here. Currently I've already shoved off a bunch of stuff to others and have nothing as of now but I imagine that will change by next week so if more stuff comes up I'll shoot you an email or DM.
Retired dev here, I'm curious about the nature of "the mess". Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like "vibe coding". If you're using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don't see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.
An example from work a few weeks ago. I fixed some vibe coded UI code that had made it to prod. The layout of the UI was basically just meant to be an easy overview of information relevant to an item. The LLM had done everything right except it assumed a weird mix of tailwind and bootstrap, mixing and matching css classes from both. After I implemented the classes myself it went from a single column view to grids and nested grids grouping the data intuitively. I talked with the dev who implemented it, and basically it was just something quickly cobbled together with AI until it was passable. The AI had added a lot of extra that served no function and that didn’t conform to a single css framework, but looked like it could. For months noone questioned it despite talk about that part of the UI needing a facelift.
I don’t know how representative it is, but about half the time I’m thoroughly confused about a piece of code and why it was written the way it was, the answer has turned out to be AI. And unlike when a developer wrote it, there rarely is any reason to have written it the weird way.
essentially, from what I've been dealing with, most if it is their offshore people using the AI to completely do the job from start to finish and no one is verifying anything. So it's not even vibe coding, it's "here's a prompt, build it, i'm pushing it to production" coding.
Think of AI as a hard working, arrogant, knowledgeable, unimaginative junior intern.
The vibe coding is great for small, self contained tasks. It doesn't scale to a codebase (yet?).
They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they'll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.
I imagine you aren't talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn't make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?
primarily medium to large companies. the smaller startups seem to know better. the former laid off a bunch of staff and in most cases offshored the work to people who ONLY use AI to build things. A few rare cases it's been a Project Manager who paid for a Claude.ai subscription and had it build things from start to finish then push to production. If I see something that has a gradient background I know they had Claude build it.
Sounds like you need to start a company and per diem staff.
Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren't in your city? I may know a couple over here in England...
Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!
Send them my way! I'm freelance currently and good at cleaning up that kind of stuff
Throw us some work if you like, although I already work as software engineer but wouldn’t turn down a side gig cleaning up after LLMs.
How much is the pay for those gigs?
Vibe coding is 5% asking for code and 95% cleaning up the code, turns out replacing people with AI is exactly the same.
Jup. But the same goes for developers that go way too fast when setting up a project or library. 2-3 months in and everything is a mess. Weird function names, all one letter vars, no inversion of control, hardcoded things etc. Good luck fixing it.
This is what I fight against every goddamn day, and I get yelled at for fighting against it, but I’m not going to stop. I want to build shit that I can largely forget about (because, you know, it’s reliable and logically extensible and maintainable) after it gets to a mature state, and I’m not shy about making that known. This has led to more than a few significant conflicts over the course of my career. It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.
Stack Exchange coding is 5% finding solutions to try and 95% copy-pasting those solutions into your project, discovering why they don't work for you, and trying the next solution on the search list.
I'm still not sure how this is any different than when I used stack exchange for exactly the same thing.
Well, SE code usually compiled and did what it said. I guess that part is different.
Same thing happened with companies that used outsourcing expecting it to be a magic bullet.
I worked in one of these companies. Within months, we went from a company I would be proud to recommend to friends to a service I would never use myself, just due to the horrendous route they took to hire overseas support.
The line of tech work I was in required about a month of training after passing the interview process, and even then you had to take a test at the end to prove you’d absorbed the material before you ever speak to a customer.
When they outsourced, they just bought a company of like 30 people in an adjacent industry and gave them a week of training. Our call queues were never worse and every customer was angry with everyone by the time they talked to someone who had training.
I don’t blame the overseas agents. I blame all the companies that treat them like cattle.
Or more generalized: management going all-in with their decisions, forgetting there is a sweet spot for everything, and then backtracking losing employee time and company money. Sometimes these cause huge backlash, like Wells Fargo pushy sales practices, or great loses, like Meta with Metaverse
Ah so AI does create jobs, it’s the Zorg logic
Jean-Baptiste
Emmanuel
Zorg
Pretty damn good jobs too, tbh.
All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent
But i guess it's always labor that pays the price
You know they’re just going to get bonuses and promotions.
What’s sad is that the AI hype did inflate stock prices.
Most c suites’ job is to look out for the interests of investors.
Technically they did a good job. I hate capitalism
The power to fire lies within the leadership themselves though...
Oh, you mean an actual fire?! I like your way of thinking.
Same thing happened during the outsourcing craze of early 2000s. Everything and I mean everything moved to India or Philippines. There's even a movie about it because it was so common. I and everyone else lost our jobs. about a year later the contracts expired and we all got jobs back and outsourcing is used in balance. Eventually ai use will be balanced I hope. It cannot replace us. Not yet anyways.
AI needs to be used as a tool for workers, not a replacement for workers. They will figure it out eventually.
thats because the main peddlers are the ceo/csuites of these tech companies, and the customers arnt people like you or me, its other corporate heads. in case of palintir it would be the government.
Let them burn.
Deserved and expected
Companies with stupid leaders deserve to fail.
Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.
He'll make all the stupid decisions. But they're only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.
From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say "See how that company is failing without me? That's because I bring value to the brand."
So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.
These actions aren't stupid. They're plotted corruption for the benefit of one.
What's really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they're spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more
Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don't care because they've gotten good at knowing when to skip out
No that never happens /S
I used to work with a supplier that hired a former Monsanto executive as their CEO. When his first agenda came out I told their sales team he was an idiot and to have fun looking for a new job a few months.
The CEO bailed after 2 years to start his own "consulting business."
1 year later the company lost 75% of their market share and was laying off people left and right. They are still afloat barely.
After a couple years "consulting", the CEO went to another company in 2023. He didn't bounce fast enough and got caught on this one. He was fired 2 weeks ago and the company shut their doors except for a handful of staff to facilitate the firesale of the companies assets.
The even brighter side of it is that it should be easier to spot these companies when job hunting.
IMO: Demand higher wages and iron clad contracts from them because they already demonstrated how they feel about paying people.
They’ll surely cut anyone they can again as soon as they can.
no surprise
AI: The new outsourcing?
Very expected. It's fine. I'll come back at 10 times my previous rate. And you'll thank me for it. Fucking chads.
Hope they lose billions!!
McNamara fallacy at its finest. They hear figures and potential savings and then jump into the hype without considering the context. It is the same when they heard of lean manufacturing or Toyota way. Companies thought it is cost saving rather than process improvement.
Kinda like Wal-Mart trying to “save money” with self check out and now they are walking it back.
At least in my area they've decided to walk back the walk back.
They went from "Self checkouts are now only for ten items or less" to "Self checkouts are permanently closed" and now they've gone to "Self checkouts can be used for any number of items and also we added four more".
The BBC report cited mainly focused on the marketing industry, with the fixing mistake people being the copywriters. This gives a strong vibe of Madman, where you have the "old-fashioned" copywriters and the tension between market research.
I wonder if there's a market here. I feel like a company that cleans up AI bullshit would make bank lol
You son of a bitch, I'm in!
Nah, I came here to make this comment and you already have it well in hand. It's not really any different other than the marketing spin, though. Companies have always had bad code and hired specialists to sort it out. And over half of the specialists suck, too, and so the merry-go-round spins.
Oh noes, who could have seen this coming
They should have just asked me. I knew that would be the result years ago. Writing has been on the screaming wall of faces while the faces also screamed it.
Management doesn't ask people they want to fire is firing them is a good idea. They themselves would lie like crazy to keep their job and assume therefore everything the developers say would be a lie too.
And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.
Nah all they have to say is "that is what the guy from the XYZ consultancy suggested. He told me that everyone is replacing their coding teams with %95 AI assistants and a single newly graduated programmer that works for food."
Or just declare victory and move on to the next project quickly
What these companies didn't take the time to understand is, A.I. is a tool to make employees more efficient, not to replace them. Sadly the vast majority of these companies will also fail to learn this lesson now and will get rid of A.I. systems altogether rather than use them properly.
When I write a document for my employer I use A.I. as a research and planning assistant, not as the writer. I still put in the work writing the document, I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.
If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.
yes, 100%, do not use an LLM for anything you’re not prepared to vet and verify all of. The longer an LLM’s response the higher the odds it loses context and starts repeating or stating total gibberish or makes up data to keep going. If that’s what you want (like a list of fake addresses and phone numbers to prototype an app), great, but that’s about all it’s going to really do.
Oh I check the citations. I'm fully aware of A.I. hallucinations.
My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. In her prompts she tells it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well, produces high quality writing, and saves her a ton of time. She's actually a very competent writer herself, so when she compliments the quality I know it means something.
That's a good way to use the tool. I generally use the OpenAI option to set up a custom gpt and tell it to become an expert on the subject I'm writing about, then set the parameters. Then once I've tested it on a piece of the subject matter I already understand and confirm it's working properly, I begin asking it questions. When I'm out of questions or just need a break, I go back and check the citations for each answer just to make sure I'm not getting bad data.
Once I've run out of questions and all the data is verified, I have it create an outline with a brief summary of each section. Then I take that outline and use that to guide me as I write. Also it seems like the A.I. always puts at least one section in the wrong place so that's just another reason I like to write it myself and just use an A.I. summary outline.
AI: Confidently Incorrect
Yet their reputations will somehow never return...
Hiring people at lower wages that is.
I hope this is true. I would like to have a job again.
It's true, although the smart companies aren't laying off workers in the first place, because they're treating AI as a tool to enhance their productivity rather than a tool to replace them.
I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.
And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.
Productivity will go up, wages will remain the same, and no additional time off will be given to employees. They’ll merely be required to produce 4x as much and compensation will not increase to match.
It seems the point of all these machines and automation isn’t to make our individual lives easier and more prosperous, but instead to increase and maximize shareholder value.
Does anyone have numbers on that? Microsoft just announced they're laying off around 10k.
Idk about engaging productivity.
If your job is just doing a lot of trivial code that just gets used once, yeah I can see it improving productivity.
If your job is more tackling the least trivial challenges and constantly needing to understand the edge cases or uncharted waters of the framework/tool/language, it’s completely useless.
This is why you get a lot of newbies loving AI and a lot of seniors saying it’s counter productive.
Fewer workers are required when their productivity is enhanced.
jobs are for suckers, be a consultant and charge triple
I'm absolutely not charismatic enough to pull that off.
It's technically closer to Schrodinger's truth. It goes both ways depending on "when" you look at it. Publicly traded companies are more or less expected to adopt AI as it is the next "cheap" labor... so long as it is the cheapest of any option. See the very related: slave labor and it's variants, child labor, and "outsourcing" to "less developed" countries.
The problem is they need to dance between this experimental technology and ... having a publicly "functional" company. The line demands you cut costs but also increase service. So basically overcorrection hell. Mass hirings into mass firings. Every quarter / two quarters depending on the company... until one of two things becomes true: ai works or ai no longer is the cheapest solution. I imagine that will rubberband for quite some time. (saas shit like oracle etc)
In short - I'd not expect this to be more than a brief reprieve from a rapidly drying well. Take advantage of it for now - but I'd recommend not expecting it to remain.
The line demands it go up. It doesn't care how you get there. In many cases, decreasing service while also cutting costs is the way to do it so long as line goes up.
See: enshittification