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Posted
13 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

In one case, when an agent couldn't find the right person to consult on RocketChat (an open-source Slack alternative for internal communication), it decided to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user."

Sounds pretty damned human to me.

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Posted
12 hours ago, gurt said:

What is already becoming manifest is that AI dev tools like Cursor or Copilot are very useful in the hands of already senior engineers, who know when to call it on its BS.  In my org, the senior devs who are using it basically have an incredibly fast junior dev at their disposal to help them get stuff done faster, which is all well and good.  But when the human junior dev uses it in the same way, they implicitly trust the output from the AI junior dev and thus there are no guardrails preventing the blind from leading the blind.  We just had a junior on my team send up code for review that while (thankfully) not completely wrong was done in such an over-engineered and complicated way that if it were to have been approved it would've been completely out of line with the best practices and general framework of our codebase.  Do this enough times and best case scenario you have a terribly unwieldy, spaghetti codebase and at worst a ton of bugs making it to production. 

 

This is exactly my experience on the legal side of things. I’m using it more and more in a discrete instance and the analysis and even the writing is solid. But I’ll spend an hour or more working with the AI tool like is a junior attorney basically making it probe its work. I certainly know where to start but I let AI formulate the approach to an argument and then I probe it for accuracy and improvement. Prompts like, please double check, are you sure, please quote the statute or case (I don’t cite cases so I have less risk there), please provide a link so I can verify, etc. then when it’s time for work product I ask it to write up the letter, memo, clause in a contract, and then I work on the language with it but it’s already writing at a high level when I use a prompt like please prepare a lawyer demand letter written in a style that is sophisticated and similar to what you would expect from the best law firms in the country. Out pops some pretty fantastic writing that I then edit to put my voice into it.  As of right now I don’t see the need for a junior attorney and not even 3 months ago I was planning to hire someone, I still may but the calculus has changed.

Posted
9 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Which means they never progress to seniors and you eventually run out. Doesn’t seem all that smart to me. 

I think this is the existential threat of AI, not job losses per se. Companies, firms, management and schools and universities are going to have to actively solve for this issue in the long run. 

Unless AI can fully replace the nuanced judgment of experts humans where subjectivity and circumstantial dependencies including human mood dictate outcomes, which I am quite suspicious can happen, then the risk really is the elimination of the path to experience for younger workers. 

Posted
12 hours ago, Goredho said:

Yeah, we're using cursor, and it's definitely a productivity boon for people with a reasonable amount of experience.  Our organizational answer to the problem you describe is to just not hire juniors any more.

This is dumb. I had a call last week with a group of dev management and this topic was a big discussion. Ultimately, the idea was that the juniors that can pivot fast enough to situations and were also skilled at prompts and knowledgeable enough to review the output were going to become seniors. 

The juniors will be replaced by people of similar skill.

Posted
On 6/27/2025 at 3:41 PM, Goredho said:

Yeah, your perspective might be different from where I sit, and vice versa.

I think one issue at play that makes an analysis from a historical perspective insufficient is that the pace and scale of disruptive change is accelerating at an exponential pace, while the general cognitive ability of the human brain is not.  At the very least, technological advancements can far outpace evolutionary advancement.  How humans adapted to the scope and velocity of technological disruption in say the 15th century when scribes started being replaced by the printing press (a process that took over a century) is not necessarily applicable to how humans will adapt to the far greater velocity/magnitude of change that AI disruption will bring in the 21st century.

But do I think AI is the end of the world?  Absolutely not.  Life will certainly go on.

Do I think it could be the nail in the coffin of the period of democratized wealth enjoyed by most in the U.S. in the 2nd half of the 20th and early 21st century?  A period you enjoyed to be in the position you are today as a retired angel investor intrigued by AI? Absolutely.

I am not naive enough to think the AI genie is going back in the bottle.  What I hope happens is that we collectively choose to ensure the investor/board/executive class has to take into account the rest of society in their plans revolutionize the world with AI.  So I hope the attempted ban on AI regulation fails.  I don't think its in our best interests for the government to abdicate any ability to ensure something other than profit motive is governing the powers that be.

Crisis averted. Regulation is still in play for all 50 states.

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