This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other engineers -- bother to read and review your design if you didn't even bother to write it?
Taking a distance uni class now to maybe swap away from dev work and my submitted works that are to be reviewed and commented on by other students all come back with AI generated feedback and it's making me go insane. If I needed AI feedback I'd go ask an AI but for any communication now it's a cointoss if you're getting a human reply.
Yeah, but I guess harder for the professor to check up on too. It's a course on a specific kind of creative writing so human feedback would be QUITE helpful instead of AI responses about how good parts are.
I'm starting to see pushback for this. I know a Product Manager that was fired for padding his documentation with AI to the point there were mistakes and wasted work due to AI hallucinations.
I see it even on my GitHub project, issues and pull request comments get longer, responses get longer, all generated by ai and read by ai. This text is no longer for human consumption, but to provide context to ai.
Seems like we risk the atrophy of western software while surpassed by software developed in places and cultures where they don't "move fast and break things".
We have never needed to "move slow and fix things" more than right now.
I'm not opposed to "move fast and break things" but our problem is that's the only lever we pull. For every "... and break things" there needs to be a phase of "clean up, everybody do your share". It seems the modern development framework is allergic to cleaning up. There's so many excuses given but if you don't clean up you can't move fast.
In physical reverse engineering there's a common pattern people use: buy 3. One to break, one to modify, one to reference. You need the one to break because you're going in blind. The problem has a lot of unknown unknowns. It's often difficult to take things apart (especially these days) without breaking them. But the second time it is much easier to do nondestructively.
But I'm also a big fan of taking time to think and understand. To gain deep understanding of things. I've always found this to be helpful and allowed me to move faster in the long run but I often face resistance to this because everyone wants me to "move fast".
The problem is I think people have the illusion that you can run a marathon by doing consecutive 100m dashes. It sounds nice in theory but I think there's no surprise that burnout is at an all time high and things are getting sloppy.
It's weird, we've systematically created a work structure that has the same principles as scams: frame everything as an emergency so the mark doesn't have time to think. Why the fuck are we scamming ourselves?
What I find particularly irritating is that you can actually prompt the fcking AI to be short.
> Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible.
It takes more effort to be brief, even for humans. Good documentation writers were always brief.
Simply saying "be concise" isn't enough. I often have Claude write first drafts for me (which, for the record, I review completely and rewrite as needed before publishing) and even when told to be concise, there are times when what comes out is unusably long and wordy.
I've seen some of this as well. It's OK to send me an agentic screed if it's just going to be consumed by my agent, but I want a nicely written summary up top that was made by you... I'm starting to value poor grammar, typos, and other signs of legitimacy
