Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

Some good examples from the bookkeeping/accounting industry is automating the matching of payments to the invoices and using AI to extract and process invoices.

This 1000x. I am a PHP developer, I found out about two months ago that the AI assistant is included in my Jetbrains subscription (All pack, it was a separate thing before). And recently found about Junie, their AI agent that has deep thinking (or whatever the hell it is called). I tried it the same day to refactor part of my test that had to migrated to stop using a deprecated function call.

To my surprise, it required only very minor changes, but what would've taken me about 3 hours was done in half an hour. What I also liked was that it actually asked if it can run a terminal command to verify thr test results and it went back and fixed a broken test or two.

Finally I have faith in AI being useful to programmers.

For a test, I took our dev exam (for potential candidates) and just sent it to see what it does just based on the document, and besides a few mistakes it even used modern tools and not some 5 year old stuff (like PSR standards) and implemented core systems by itself using well known interfaces (from said PSRs). I asked it to change Dependency Injection to use Symfony DI instead of the self-made thing, and it worked flawlessly.

Of course, the code has to be reviewed or heavily specified to make sure it does what it is told to, but all in all it doesn't look like just a gimmick anymore.

We've hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work... the results are marginally better than either approach independently.

They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they'll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.

Sounds like you need to start a company and per diem staff.

I imagine you aren't talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn't make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?

Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren't in your city? I may know a couple over here in England...

Throw us some work if you like, although I already work as software engineer but wouldn’t turn down a side gig cleaning up after LLMs.

Send them my way! I'm freelance currently and good at cleaning up that kind of stuff

Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!

Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.

He'll make all the stupid decisions. But they're only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.

From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say "See how that company is failing without me? That's because I bring value to the brand."

So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.

These actions aren't stupid. They're plotted corruption for the benefit of one.

Pretty damn good jobs too, tbh.

It's true, although the smart companies aren't laying off workers in the first place, because they're treating AI as a tool to enhance their productivity rather than a tool to replace them.

jobs are for suckers, be a consultant and charge triple

It's technically closer to Schrodinger's truth. It goes both ways depending on "when" you look at it. Publicly traded companies are more or less expected to adopt AI as it is the next "cheap" labor... so long as it is the cheapest of any option. See the very related: slave labor and it's variants, child labor, and "outsourcing" to "less developed" countries.

The problem is they need to dance between this experimental technology and ... having a publicly "functional" company. The line demands you cut costs but also increase service. So basically overcorrection hell. Mass hirings into mass firings. Every quarter / two quarters depending on the company... until one of two things becomes true: ai works or ai no longer is the cheapest solution. I imagine that will rubberband for quite some time. (saas shit like oracle etc)

In short - I'd not expect this to be more than a brief reprieve from a rapidly drying well. Take advantage of it for now - but I'd recommend not expecting it to remain.

Jup. But the same goes for developers that go way too fast when setting up a project or library. 2-3 months in and everything is a mess. Weird function names, all one letter vars, no inversion of control, hardcoded things etc. Good luck fixing it.

Stack Exchange coding is 5% finding solutions to try and 95% copy-pasting those solutions into your project, discovering why they don't work for you, and trying the next solution on the search list.

I'm still not sure how this is any different than when I used stack exchange for exactly the same thing.

Well, SE code usually compiled and did what it said. I guess that part is different.

I worked in one of these companies. Within months, we went from a company I would be proud to recommend to friends to a service I would never use myself, just due to the horrendous route they took to hire overseas support.

The line of tech work I was in required about a month of training after passing the interview process, and even then you had to take a test at the end to prove you’d absorbed the material before you ever speak to a customer.

When they outsourced, they just bought a company of like 30 people in an adjacent industry and gave them a week of training. Our call queues were never worse and every customer was angry with everyone by the time they talked to someone who had training.

I don’t blame the overseas agents. I blame all the companies that treat them like cattle.

Or more generalized: management going all-in with their decisions, forgetting there is a sweet spot for everything, and then backtracking losing employee time and company money. Sometimes these cause huge backlash, like Wells Fargo pushy sales practices, or great loses, like Meta with Metaverse

You know they’re just going to get bonuses and promotions.

What’s sad is that the AI hype did inflate stock prices.

Most c suites’ job is to look out for the interests of investors.

Technically they did a good job. I hate capitalism

The power to fire lies within the leadership themselves though...
Oh, you mean an actual fire?! I like your way of thinking.

I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.

If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.

If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.

You son of a bitch, I'm in!

Nah, I came here to make this comment and you already have it well in hand. It's not really any different other than the marketing spin, though. Companies have always had bad code and hired specialists to sort it out. And over half of the specialists suck, too, and so the merry-go-round spins.

Management doesn't ask people they want to fire is firing them is a good idea. They themselves would lie like crazy to keep their job and assume therefore everything the developers say would be a lie too.

At least in my area they've decided to walk back the walk back.

They went from "Self checkouts are now only for ten items or less" to "Self checkouts are permanently closed" and now they've gone to "Self checkouts can be used for any number of items and also we added four more".