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bluefirebrandHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

My company recently issued an "Use AI in your workflow or else" mandate and it has absolutely …

My company recently issued an "Use AI in your workflow or else" mandate and it has absolutely destroyed my motivation to work Even though there are still private whispers of "just keep doing what you're doing no one is going to be fired for not using AI", just the existence of the top down mandate has made me want to give up and leave My fear is that this is every company right now, and I'm basically no longer a fit for this industry at all Edit: I'm a long way from retirement unfortunately so I'm really stuck. Not sure what my path forward is. Seems like a waste to turn away from my career that I have years of experience doing, but I struggle like crazy to use AI tools. I can't get into any kind of flow with them. I'm constantly frustrated by how aggressively they try to jump in front of my thought process. …

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zdragnarHN

I'm fairly certain that I lost a job opportunity because the manager interviewing me kept asking me variations of how I use AI when I code. Unless I'm stuck while experimenting with a new language or finding something in a library's documentation, I don't use AI at all. I just don't feel the need for it in my primary skill set because I've been doing it so long that it would take me longer to get AI to an acceptable answer than doing it myself. The idea seemed rather offensive to him, and I'm quite glad I didn't go to work there, or anywhere that using AI is an expectation rather than an option. I definitely don't see a team that relies on it heavily having fun in the long run. Everyone has time for new features, but nobody wants to dedicate time to rewriting old ones that are an unholy mess of bad assumptions and poorly understood.

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daxfohlHN

The other side of me thinks that maybe the eventual landing point of all this is a merger of engineering and PM. A sizeable chunk of engineering work isn't really anything new. CRUD, jobs, events, caching, synchronization, optimizing for latency, cost, staleness, redundancy. Sometimes it amazes me that we're still building so many ad-hoc ways of doing the same things. Like, say there's a catalog of 1000 of the most common enterprise (or embedded, or UI, or whatever) design patterns, and AI is good at taking your existing system, your new requirements, identifying the best couple design patterns that fit, give you a chart with the various tradeoffs, and once you select one, are able to add that pattern to your existing system, with the details that match your requirements. Maybe that'd be cool? The system/AI would then be able to represent the full codebase as an integration of various pa…

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ryandrakeHN

I just don't understand your company and the company OP interviewed for. This is like mandating everyone use syntax highlighting or autocomplete, or sit in special type of chair or use a standing desk, and making their use a condition for being hired. Why are companies so insistent that their developers "use AI somehow" in their workflows?

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ponectorHN

There are lots of ways to use AI coding tools. Cursor is great for fuzy search across the legacy project. Requests like "how you do X here" can help a lot while fixing old bug. Or adding a documents. Commit description generated based on diff. Or adding a javadoc to your methods. Whatever step in your workflow which consists of rewriting existing text but not creating anything new - use Cursor or similar AI tool.

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