this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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I mean it is also generous to the Artificial Idiot to say it only has a 1% error rate, it’s probably closer to 10% on the low end. Which humans can be far better than in terms of just directly following the assigned task but does not factor in how people can adapt and problem solve. Most minor issues real people have can be solved without much of a fuss because of that. Meanwhile the Artificial Idiot can’t even draw a full wine glass so good luck getting it to fix its own mistake on something important.
How's that annoying meme go? Tell me that you've never been a middle manager without telling me that you've never been a middle manager?
You can keep pulling numbers out of your bum to argue that AI is worse. That just creates a simple bar to follow because... most workers REALLY are incompetent (now, how much of that has to do with being overworked and underpaid during late stage capitalism is a related discussion...). So all "AI Companies" have to do is beat ridiculously low metrics.
Or we can acknowledge the real problem. "AI" is already a "better worker" than the vast majority of entry level positions (and that includes title inflation). We can either choose not to use it (fat chance) or we can acknowledge that we are looking at a fundamental shift in what employment is. And we can also realize that not hiring and training those entry level goobers is how you never have anyone who can actually "manage" the AI workers.
You just use other AI to manage those worker AI. Experiments do show that having different instances of AI/LLM, each with an assigned role like manager, designer, coding or quality checks, perform pretty good working together. But that was with small stuff. I haven't seen anyone wiling to test with complex products.
I've seen those demos and they are very much staged publicity.
The reality is that the vast majority of those roles would be baked into the initial request. And the reality of THAT is the same as managing a team of newbies and "rock star" developers with title inflation: Your SDLC is such that you totally trust your team. The reality is that you spend most of your day monitoring them and are ready to "ask a stupid question" if you figured out they broke
mainwhile you were skimming the MRs in between meetings. Or you are "just checking in to let you know this guy is the best" if your sales team have a tendency to say complete and utter nonsense for a commission.Design gets weird. Generally speaking, you can tell a team to "give me a mock-up of a modern shopping cart interface". That is true whether your team is one LLM or ten people under a UI/UX Engineer. And the reality is that you then need to actually look at that and possibly consult your SMEs to see if it is a good design or if it is the kind of nonsense the vast majority of UX Engineers make (some are amazing and focus on usability studies and scholarly articles. Most just rock vibes and copy Amazon...). Which, again, is not that different than an "AI".
So, for the forseeable future: "Management" and designers are still needed. "AI" is ridiculously good at doing the entry level jobs (and reddit will never acknowledge that "just give me a bunch of jira tickets with properly defined requirements and test cases" means they have an entry level job after 20 years of software engineering...). It isn't going to design a product or prioritize what features to work on. Over time, said prioritizing will likely be less "Okay ChatGPT. Implement smart scrolling" and more akin to labeling where people say "That is a good priority" or "That is a bad priority". But we are a long way off from that.
But... that is why it is important to stop with the bullshit "AI can't draw feet, ha ha ha" and focus more on the reality of what is going to happen to labor both short and long term.