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Did they try and be an blockchain-first company when that was the rage? Making NFTs and whatnot. Is your CEO just a trend-follower?

These aren't related in the way you think they are. Stock price reacts quickly to broader market trends, but more slowly for company-specific trends where revenue is likely stable. The impact of AI in engineering work will take months to show up in the product, probably a year after that for customers and the market to take notice. An AI product is a different thing entirely.

The beatings will continue until moral improves

They’ll say no but really… you know.

Actually I think the opposite - we will learn that the most important thing is the ability to manage context & steer these models instead of using a rube goldberg machine. Some of the top performing agent harnesses on Terminal Bench provide literally one tool: tmux, which outperforms Claude Code et al. To me, the most important thing by far when getting reasonable output from these machines are what you put into it.

Spanish AI would require all AI systems to pause for 2 hours after lunch hour

Partially a contracting real economy following overhiring early in the decade, partially trying to discipline labor, partially a pretty profound disconnect from both market pressures and concrete metrics that comes from a business model more centered around stock value and funding raises than revenue per se

Trend following - everyone's jumping. And bad economy.

Outsourcing to India and the Philippines

Because there was bloat and AI was a good scape goat.

Typical bad management decisions that came home to roost. It’s a lot easier to say “AI productivity improvements” than for the CEO to say “I’m cleaning up terrible performance on my part and a lot of bad business decisions.”

To juice the next quarter. Extreme short-term thinking has become the norm at every business I've worked at and every business I'm aware of, so upper management has no issue cutting teams right down to the bone.

It's why software has become far more unstable. There's nobody around to actually maintain it.

I think a lot of the disconnect in the programming world is we treat all programming as equivalent and it's not.

There really are many programming jobs that are rote and I have no problem believing that an LLM based tool can learn the pattern and regurgitate with the tweak de jour. In those jobs LLMs probably do increase productivity.

But there are other programming jobs that are not rote and there is no pattern to learn because you haven't done the thing yet. LLMs aren't any more useful than a normal base library would be, and if you're already good at using a library of code, they're not a productivity booster and often, in my experience, a hinderance.

I think another point is the prompt actually forces the engineer to spend a moment to actually think about what they're doing and make some kind of plan. Pre-AI tools way too many programmers just jumped straight into problems without thinking what they were doing figuring they could code their way out of anything and ending up stuck in some cul de sac and having to back track. And if they just stopped and made a basic plan they wouldn't have that issue. Forcing engineers to make a plan, who wouldn't otherwise do so, before they start, could definitely be a productivity booster for them.

Not the OP, but there are likely many tens/hundreds of thousands of people using AI daily because their management requires it. Management tracks AI usage by employee and uses it as a KPI. You want to keep your job, you use AI. You want a bonus, you use AI a lot.

This is simultaneously one of the easier management KPIs for employees to hit and one of the least meaningful.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-work-use-performance-reviews-...

> Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are.

So why are you using the tools? Personal curiosity? Workplace mandate?

I've made measurably more and faster progress on both professional and personal projects since adopting these tools. Sometimes assisted is less productive than unassisted, but the net gain is pretty obvious to me.

I don’t like the tools personally, and find the reversion of any sort of interface to a chat interface a huge loss to UI - but for the love of all things holy why are using them if they don’t provide any benefit?

> Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are

I'm really struggling to understand why you would use them that much if you aren't sure they are more productive. Is it just a more enjoyable workflow for you?

I ask because I find AI assisted workflows extremely painful. Constantly pulling me out of flow, like driving in gridlock traffic.

If AI just means automation, then sure. We absolutely need more automation and if LLMs are not the mechanism then something else better be. More automation is the life blood of our industry. But are LLMs a game changer or today's fuzzy logic? [1] Time will tell...

[1] https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/digit...

P.S. I'm not saying fuzzy logic doesn't have applications, I know rice cookers are a thing, but I think it's safe to say we have other options for controlling non-linear systems these days.

WE do have self driving cars with Waymo data showing it is clearly better than human drivers in certain markets like Phoenix. It is human regulations, laws and the general societal unease that is preventing a total rapid change. In fact a Robotaxis only urban area which is continuously mapped might be feasible today and probably could even reduce the no of cars needed for the population making it accessible to many more.

Was there any recent technology that really delivered what was the general promise?

depends if post-correction it is worth anyone's money to keep training new frontier models. It could be that it isn't, so we are left with models that were trained in the bubble, but are now increasingly out of date, or (open?) models that are trained much more cheaply somehow with consequent lack of utility.

They should have asked AI CEOs

I've found the best way for me to wield it is the tool to build tools. I would have never in a million years been able to code. But I've used it to replace things I was paying hefty monthly subscriptions for....

So I'm not actually being more productive, but I've cut my costs significantly to do the same things I could do before.