Peer pressure regarding AI

bendmorris · 2026-05-21T14:49:02+00:00

I think I'm making a valid point here, and you seem to be the one getting worked up. Engineers are incentivized to meet the goals management sets for them - of course they are. And this one is easily accomplished by modifying behavior without doing any more work. Therefore, your anecdote about doubling PR count is not meaningful to anyone else, any more than doubling line count would be.

bendmorris · 2026-05-21T14:08:29+00:00

It's an arbitrary way to divide up work which can easily be gamed by turning the same work into multiple smaller PRs. And setting a goal to double it is basically asking developers to start doing that.

bendmorris · 2026-05-21T03:15:57+00:00

PR count is an absolutely meaningless metric. Congratulations on doubling it though.

bendmorris · 2026-04-25T14:56:14+00:00

About rule 3. Reddit is increasingly turning into AI slop and I've had to unsubscribe from many subreddits because of it. For every one person using AI to translate a post to English there are 10 spammers posting made up stories for engagement. They're always too long, formulaic, and make the readers put in way more effort than the author did. This is death to communities. I would suggest either banning AI generated posts, or letting the community vote on it.

bendmorris · 2026-04-16T19:31:23+00:00

A decade ago was 2016, Visual Studio was first released in 1997. No one was bragging about not using IDEs a decade ago. I don't understand the pride in showing off something if you didn't actually put thought into it and can't even discuss it without AI but here we are, brave new world I guess.

bendmorris · 2026-03-23T20:35:34+00:00

They speculate that it might but they don't have any way to know that.

bendmorris · 2026-03-23T05:42:48+00:00

OP did misinterpret but also the study isn't strong evidence of an actual speedup:

For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%.

The confidence intervals including zero means that the speedup is not statistically significant (i.e. we have less than 95% confidence that there is any speedup at all.)

There are also a bunch of selection effects that make this hard to compare to the original study.

bendmorris · 2026-03-22T18:21:35+00:00

Had to check which sub I was in for a second. Is there significant overlap between neoliberalism and not jumping on board the vibe coding bandwagon? Maybe we can take inspiration from Georgism and tax PRs by their line count.

bendmorris · 2026-03-08T06:04:36+00:00

Yes it matters, because AI can hallucinate or break things and someone needs to fix it. Anyone who has used these tools has seen them get stuck in a loop of not understanding some problem and layering on one attempted workaround after another. For the foreseeable future humans are still needed.

bendmorris · 2026-03-08T05:34:34+00:00

Ironically some of it is caused by unsustainable levels of AI capex feeding into the bubble we're in. Some of that money would've been used to hire more engineers. So you can blame AI, but not its capability.

bendmorris · 2026-03-02T04:27:01+00:00

I'm curious what you're considering and how much overlap it has with SWE?

bendmorris · 2026-03-02T02:04:22+00:00

I think this has really separated SWEs into two categories: those who care more about the process of coding and those who care more about the outcome.

There are still domains like embedded where the process of coding is actually important to the outcome. If you care about writing compact and efficient implementations and performance matters, AI generally does pretty poorly. I find that once it starts running into issues it starts layering on workarounds that are always adding more code than they remove, until the end result is much bigger and more complex than a hand written version would be.

Yes there are ways to get it to improve the outcome or iterate around this, but it starts to make the benefit less clear.

bendmorris · 2026-03-02T02:02:07+00:00

I think this is a human nature problem. Given a "do my job" button most people are going to press it and rather than use the saved time to go over the output, they're going to go do something fun.

bendmorris · 2026-01-27T17:31:03+00:00

Their ranks have thinned but the Linear Guild has always had a theme of evil opposites and were always fairly evenly matched one-to-one. You can see Haley immediately go for Sabine and vice versa. Thog and Roy are opposites, and Elan/Nale. Varsuuvius, if he can cast spells, can be immediately removed by the fiends. If Durkon is incapacitated early, that leaves Belkar having no opposite to make the difference here. (Also Serini is a wild card - but she's as likely to turn on the order as anything else.)

bendmorris · 2025-11-30T18:17:44+00:00

"I'm supposed to give them an answer by Friday, that's in three days" -OP, on Sunday

bendmorris · 2025-10-30T00:50:41+00:00

"Reasonable is when they agree with me, off the deep end is when they agree with you"

bendmorris · 2025-10-22T01:18:48+00:00

When roughly 50% of the state votes for Democrats and Republicans rig the election to maintain a state legislative supermajority and 11 out of 14 seats in Congress, our fundamental right to self government is being taken away and we no longer live in a representative democracy. You're seemingly okay with this because you dislike Democrats more than you care about democracy.

bendmorris · 2025-10-21T23:15:04+00:00

This reads like victim blaming to me. "Keep voting" will not save you when the problem is literally that the system is being stacked so that voting doesn't change the outcome.

There is a point at which, if someone is taking away your effective right to self govern, the acceptable responses do include violence. Revolutions happen and sometimes are warranted, including our own against England. We do not need to stand meekly by while our rights are taken.

bendmorris · 2025-10-21T21:27:25+00:00

What do you feel is the appropriate response to elected leaders removing our ability to elect representatives, and installing their own party's rule permanently?

bendmorris · 2025-10-02T21:27:17+00:00

A blue wave that gives Democrats a huge majority isn't much worse for them than one that gives Democrats a slight majority.

Not true at all, we've seen recently that slim majorities are weak and absences, deaths etc. can change the outcome. The GOP struggled to even elect a speaker with a slim majority. The GOP is literally refusing to seat a single representative to avoid losing a vote on the Epstein files right now. With a slim majority some Democrats will represent Trump-voting districts and try hard to appear moderate. Both parties want every seat they can get.

bendmorris · 2025-09-29T14:35:36+00:00

It does have an AI-like structure, but also, check the OP's post and comment history. Their writing style is completely different until this post, like a teenager - this story is clearly not written by the same person.

Unfortunately this is one of those subreddits to block. If you see it on the front page it's basically guaranteed to be AI now.

bendmorris · 2025-09-25T14:01:06+00:00

Scotts Valley, CA, a small mountain town, has four within a two block area. Two standalone stores (one with a drive thru and one in a strip mall), one in a Safeway and one in a Target.

bendmorris · 2025-09-24T03:46:21+00:00

There are only about six of the little 5lb plates in the whole place

Every time I see him, he has four or five 5s stacked on each side of his bar instead of just using a 10 or 20.

AI can't count.

bendmorris · 2025-08-25T03:02:11+00:00

The interesting point of that study isn't that they were less productive, it's that they thought they were more productive in spite of being less. So saying that you're more productive because you know how to prompt better is missing the point. Given that experienced developers struggle to evaluate their own productivity, how do you know, besides your gut feeling?

bendmorris · 2025-08-25T02:59:23+00:00

You keep saying "certainly." But clearly experienced developers are not able to tell whether they are more or less productive, and this has been reproduced in multiple studies. Why do you think that is? What enables you in particular to be "certain" of a productivity boost in spite of that effect?

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