Are people's bosses making them use AI tools?

LLMs are the first technology I've experienced where there's a lot of top-down pressure to adopt it ASAP. Most other technologies in my career, like VCS or static analysis or whatever else were championed by colleagues or peers.

It’s like forcing your entire organisation to use Emacs because you switched to using Orgmode, literal programming, Lisp and found your productivity shot up for specific use cases.

But oh yeah, it makes “the line” go up and to the right.

Business leaders were bamboozled into thinking they were going to get innovators dilemma'd if they didn't adopt AI. It was either that, or being told that they could go lean and fire their workforce.

That's all probably going to happen at the next phase of AI, but it's just not where the current slate of LLMs are. We've hit a wall in terms of utility. LLMs kind of suck for everything but search and code tab auto-suggest.

Generative images and video, on the other hand, are 100% going to disrupt incumbents. Everyone from Adobe to Disney and Netflix are scrambling and trying to figure out how this tech changes the economics of production. I'm talking to production studios that are already underbidding each other by an order of magnitude. It's a bloodbath.

  there's a lot of top-down pressure to adopt it ASAP

Because you're training it to replace you. MBA's have found a tool that finally allows them to cut out pesky intellectuals and creatives and they're chomping at the bit to make that a reality. Look around, dark enlightenment is being embraced/tolerated at the top.

What a lot of these More Bad Advice pinheads are too stupid to understand is: If you do not need those pesky tech people to make an app for your clients, then your clients do not need you either.

They are imagining being able to fire all the people who are setting it up. It remains to be seen if this will actually happen.

It's all about the story that's sold to the higher ups. The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the vaguer the understanding of the technology. The big boss hears from a Microsoft salesman that AI = you can fire 20% of your workforce, but never questions exactly how that works. They probably never got sold static analysis in that way. That was just some kind of tool that somehow helps with that mumbo jumbo that developers spend all day typing. There's no story there that inspires a manager. AI = cut costs is music to the ears of the board. So then pressure gets applied to those lower down.

Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.

The pressure is from the investors. Then the upper management are basically obliged to fulfill that general desire

That's what they think they are doing yes but there's a big difference between what the marketing department tells us and the reality of those tools

People are generally surprised when I tell them that, we would replace the CEO before we replace the developer the way it's going.

And if you manage somehow to replace all your devs with AI, be worried about your business because the bar to compete has been lowered.

Cloud computing was similar in its top down push, at least in large organizations.

I've seen it before. Adopting Windows Server or IIS. Choosing Oracle for your RDBMS. That kind of thing. It has all the hallmarks of a decision based on a salesguy's pitch with no technical evaluation.

Nobody gets fired for buying OpenAI, AWS, IBM or Microsoft.

It's probably because there is little or no known long term consequences of using AI. In management circles AI is the magic solution to all problems.

Hence its safe to push onto users.

I agree that it looks like a mandate due to a sales pitch, but there's a difference between the higher-ups mandating adoption of a particular brand of a more generic technology—eg, choosing IIS over Apache, or Oracle over MySQL—and mandating the technology itself, when it's not something that's already required for the project (as a webserver is for a website).

While this isn't a completely unprecedented situation, it's definitely much less common than just having to use the Big Corporate version of a tech stack rather than an open source version of same just because it came bundled with the package your CEO got sold.

Not that surprising. There's nothing in it for me:

If I get more productive, I don't get paid more. If I get less productive, I get told I'm not using it correctly. Worst case: I help train the LLM to eventually take my job.

I think it is worth really deeply understanding that the bosses hate us. Capital has only begrudgingly involved labor when forced to. It is no surprise to me that genai hype happened after the largest increase in general labor power in recent memory (post 2020 labor market) and a decade long increase in the labor power among software engineers.

The bosses have seen pay and benefits go up and up and up. They've seen people jump between companies, taking institutional knowledge with them. They need the job market to crater so they can re-exert control in the relationship. LLMs are fucking catnip to this belief system. "You mean I do need to deal with those people that I have to hire and train and pay? I hate those guys! Awesome!"

I think the difference there is it was mostly contained in IT whereas AI made its way to front office, client facing parts of the organization very quickly

Oh, it'll happen. Whether the replacement will be any good is another matter entirely though. The likely outcome is that it'll resemble Google's "support." Mostly automated and good for nothing besides enraging already frustrated users. Wealthy investors and executives running the show just won't care.

Unless society puts preventative measures in place, people will lose jobs and consumers will get screwed. The increased exploitation will exacerbate the wealth gap, further intensify societal conflict, and lead to chaos. But don't worry, LLMs will flood the internet with narratives praising the state of affairs so that people can feel somewhat better about all of this.

There is a lot for you. You can become better, get rid of writing boiler plate and can focus on the complex issues instead of side hussle.

I’m seeing this second hand at the Fortune 500 my spouse works for.

They are an enterprise SaaS company in SV. Where they have machine learning software that they have been selling for more than a decade, it’s all been rebranded as AI. That’s fair enough from a sales perspective, I guess. What’s odd is that their C-suite and SVPs are pressuring everyone to use LLMs everywhere, for pretty much everything, and none of them seem to understand why it’s only that level of employee that’s seeing any benefit or expressing any interest. My spouse has reported that the running joke across the company is that the executives have jobs that can be done by LLMs, but no one else does. The ICs could not be less interested, and even if they were, legal promulgated a policy against actually putting anything confidential into any LLM other than Copilot in Azure, which the whole workforce reportedly only really uses for summarizing the increasing number of meetings that are perceived as a waste of IC time. A lot of those meetings are “let’s use AI”.

It’s absolutely insane.