I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI

There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI. Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work." That'll burn a lot of tokens. Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.

It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them. The fundamental issue is that there really aren't many convincing demonstrations that hold outs can relate to and there remains basically no evidence of real value gained. Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered. Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference . To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvem…

I've been using it for many months. I still haven't gotten any kind of boost. If I'm going to get ranked on token use though, best believe I'll be using the optimal quantity of tokens.

Yeah management should make clear they just don’t want to see AI use of zero in a given week. Not “more tokens consumed the better“ on performance reviews.

People are not actually more productive with LLMs, they are less productive. The data has shown this. So there's no reason to push people into using them - it's all just hype and magical thinking.