As I said, I’m on vacation, and for about a week now, I did basically nothing but sleep. Day or night.
I can’t tell if this actually is a vacation or just therapy for burnout. 🤔
You know what this is?
https://movq.de/v/ef1674f6c5/bird-bird.webp
A BIRD bird! 😅
I got it as a gift from a very friendly coworker and she, in turn, got it from [Maria Matějka](https://bird.nic.cz/#about-us). 😃
Okay. I have lost the “battle” against “AI” at work and I will no longer try to “fight” any of it.
It is simply what people want. They want to use it. And that’s the end of it.
And why do they want it? Because it makes their job easier. And why is that? In very large parts, it’s because we have accumulated a metric fuckton of technical debt due to decades long mismanagement. We were (and are) operating in “emergency mode” all the time. There simply was no time to clean things up or to rethink designs. We always have to go with the cheapest and quickest solution. We are never ahead of things: Earlier this year, I started an initiative and wanted to tackle some issue that I could see coming. I was shut down because this wasn’t “urgent”. Very soon after, this exact thing became that exact problem – but now, there was no time anymore to do it properly because NOW it’s urgent, so, once again, we had to go with a quick and dirty solution.
It’s always like that and I had brought it up again and again. And now we have a huge spaghetti mess that hardly anyone understands anymore.
Nobody – except AI. It can still make some sense of this and, obviously, this is useful to people.
So, any argument I make against AI is completely pointless to begin with. I’m such a fool for not having seen this earlier.
The last argument I made today was: “Look, we already have so much technical debt and spaghetti systems, we really, really must clean this up. If we throw AI on top of this now, it’ll only get so much worse.” And once more, I was shut down. My intentions were “admirable”, but “there’s no time for that”.
Okay. Good luck with that. They’ll keep doing it this way. At some point, it’ll either explode entirely and some poor soul has to clean it up, or it’ll explode and they’ll have no other choice but to throw everything away and start from scratch – assuming they can still afford that.
In other words, none of this about AI, really, nor caused by it. Our department’s massive spike in AI usage is just a symptom of the underlying management issues. And since those aren’t being addressed, nothing will change and this whole mess will only get worse.
(I blame all this on management, because, well, that’s who’s to blame. I do not have a solution for it, though – and assigning blame without constructive criticism always sucks big time. I don’t like doing this. If you had put me into that particular management position, I wouldn’t have been able to solve any of this. The thing is, though, I’m not an expert on management and it isn’t my job – I’m just the “princess” who solves your technical issues.)
We’re currently at about 28-30°C, but the relative humidity is at a crazy low level of 20%. 😳 This actually feels pretty nice. If it only were always like that …
In today’s episode of “everything goes to shit because we want it to”: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/
The supply of deep technical problems is multiplying, and the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market.
And yet:
We're reevaluating our operational footprint, and are planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams.
Another AI rant:
One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.
In prose.
This is a complete disaster.
Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.
But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.
People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.
Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.
We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.
Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.
Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.
I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?
(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)
Timeline Sandbox 
