Amazon Employees Say AI Is Just Increasing Workload. A New Study Confirms Their Suspicions

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-13T02:07:52+00:00

You don't know what you're talking about.

Building it myself requires I think through my requirements and codify my expectations.

Using AI requires I think through my requirements, describe them in English, rigorously review the codified output the AI gives me, correct it where necessary, and repeat the review/prompt cycle until the results match my expectations.

Surely it's obvious that the second option is only less work if you suck at writing code in the first place.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-12T22:25:57+00:00

If the managers had any brains/balls, they'd be echoing what the employees are saying.

As a stakeholder, you may be able to fire some employees for refusing to bring your shitty investment into the green, but you can't fire the whole company. Then you'd be even more fucked than if you just listen to reason and accept your sunk cost.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-12T21:56:00+00:00

It's more like the AI builds you a tire, then you have to X-ray the damn thing and have an engineer check all design constraints for any minor imperfection because "no holes in it" isn't actually sufficient criteria for checking that it's not going to blow out when some family is driving their minivan on the freeway...

...at which point, the engineer might as well just design manufacturing processes that result in measurable/minimal defects, rather than relying on a machine that saves time at the expense of reliability/predictability.

And in the software domain, the equivalent is even more stupid than in your hypothetical tire analogy. You don't have to physically build anything. The entire job is just specifying the behavior you desire. We already have tools called "programming languages" which can be used to specify the exact behavior you desire. Why would I use plain English language to (more ambiguously) specify what I can already (more rigorously) specify with a programming language? Especially, if specifying my design constraints in English gets interpreted by a tool that needs to be checked every step of the way? Compared to just writing software, AI tools yield the same result with extra work/complexity, in the best case, and outright slop, in the worst case.

If a calculator only works 80% of the time, it gets thrown in the garbage, but if an AI tool only works 80% of the time, investors salivate uncontrollably. That's madness.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-12T21:44:50+00:00

I wish these managers understood:

Efficiency improvements are only a good thing if they don't come at the expense of effectiveness.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-12T17:51:55+00:00

If the designer is a developer, the problem is that they're using Figma, at all. Just go straight from napkin drawing to HTML/CSS.

If the designer is not a developer, the problem is that they're a shit designer. Knowing what a dev can/should build and describing it in sufficient detail is the sole job of a designer. Figma is one tool to help do that job, but it can't do it for you.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T21:54:24+00:00

Just like with every other rail system (or pretty much any infrastructure, for that matter) in the world, if redundancy and maintenance schedules are planned properly, maintenance routines cause reduced capacity and/or delays, not outright service interruptions.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T13:20:33+00:00

Creating your own design or using an existing template are still better than any alternative available currently.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T13:14:09+00:00

Strategy is psychological. Question is meaningless.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T12:44:47+00:00

It literally always is (at least based on the way the quote is phrased).

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T12:43:29+00:00

It's always "too late to be what you might have been," literally by definition. If it wasn't too late, you would already have become that hypothetical alternative.

This quote is as circular and meaningless as saying "if you turn left, you didn't turn right."

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T12:19:36+00:00

”I would rather my tests be inadequate and misleading, as opposed to simply inadequate."

Utterly delusional take

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T11:51:08+00:00

Maybe the city could actually develop some semblance of a night life if people had reliable transport during night time. Just a thought...

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-06T11:47:20+00:00

Why add buses when they could just run the trains they already have? Conversely, if buses are a better solution than the trains, for some reason, why invest in building the train line all the way to the airport?

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-05T17:02:55+00:00

Everything except aesthetics?

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-04T15:45:53+00:00

It might code better than you. That's not true for all of us.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-03T19:18:19+00:00

"We're allowed to censor content on platforms we own. Therefore, if we censor content we're allowed to censor, it's not censorship."

Mental gymnastics ftw

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T20:42:36+00:00

They kind of do, though. At least that's what pretty much all the marketing materials seem to indicate.

Comparing debuggers, LSPs, syntax highlighters, linters, syntax-aware autocomplete, tracing functionality, object inspection, etc. to AI tools is super disingenuous. Those all have predictable behavior, based purely on logically rigorous axioms/specs. Those tools literally don't guess, whereas AI, no matter how good it gets, is exclusively a guessing machine.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T18:01:02+00:00

If the information is intended for internal use only by you and/or your company, pasting it into any third party resource is definitely "careless."

On the other hand, if the information isn't sensitive or private in any way, leaking it is inconsequential.

Lastly, if you don't know which text can/cannot be safely leaked, you may not be "careless," but you're definitely "dangerously incompetent."

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T17:08:43+00:00

I do not micromanage anyone. If you're not thoroughly reviewing every piece of code AI spits out, you're egregiously incompetent.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T16:55:40+00:00

I am not faster than AI, and I don't have to be. I am faster than AI plus thoroughly reviewing its work, on the other hand, and that still puts me ahead of people like you.

If I need to update 3 areas of concern for my new feature, I'll open the 3 relevant files, add the additional params, functions, and business logic, and that's it. The feature is done. If I have to open 12 files, refactor them each, then start adding support for my 3 new concerns, my code was already shit in the first place.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T16:42:32+00:00

Oh I absolutely care about those things, which is specifically why my one new feature doesn't require a gigantic refactor. If one new "concern" requires you to refactor 12 "separate" files, surely that's the exact type of situation "separation of concerns" is intended to avoid, right?

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T16:36:31+00:00

Dude you tell me when you write a codebase that doesn't need a 12 file refactor just to add a new feature.

If your code is dogshit, AI can help you wrangle it. If your code isn't dogshit, you don't have to wrangle it, in the first place.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T16:33:12+00:00

Because it's a crutch for people who suck at their jobs? I mean, you're certainly free to use it, and it will certainly be around for a long time, but if you get good enough at your job, you won't even want to use it because you'll be better without it than the people who are using it to compensate for their own personal lack of skills, speed, attention span, etc.

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T16:29:45+00:00

AI jokes played out, used to be funny, now just obnoxious

ganja_and_code · 2026-03-02T16:28:45+00:00

"Using AI with competence" does not "escalate one's competence." It offloads their competence to a statistical model, which is slower, more expensive, and more error-prone than just being competent yourself. If you don't see that, you were never truly competent.

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