[compton93]

I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand

This really bothers me. I've had people ask me to do some task except they get AI to provide instructions on how to do the task and send me the instructions, rather than saying "Hey can you please do X". It's insulting.

[andy99]

Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight.

This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.

[a4isms]

> This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.

This is very, very germane and a very quotable line. And these people have been around from long before LLMs appeared. These are the people who dash off an incomplete idea on Friday afternoon and expect to see a finished product in production by next Tuesday, latest. They have no self-awareness of how much context and disambiguation is needed to go from "idea in my head" to working, deterministic software that drives something like a process change in a business.

[colechristensen]

People keep asking me if AI is going to take my job and recent experience shows that it very much is not. AI is great for being mostly correct and then giving someone without enough context a mostly correct way to shoot themselves in the foot.

AI further encourages the problem in DevOps/Systems Engineering/SRE where someone comes to you and says "hey can you do this for me" having come up with the solution instead of giving you the problem "hey can you help me accomplish this"... AI gives them solutions which is more steps away to detangle into what really needs to be done.

AI has knowledge, but it doesn't have taste. Especially when it doesn't have all of the context a person with experience, it just has bad taste in solutions or just the absence of taste but with the additional problem that it makes it much easier for people to do things.

Permissions on what people have access to read and permission to change is now going to have to be more restricted because not only are we dealing with folks who have limited experience with permissions, now we have them empowered by AI to do more things which are less advisable.

[candiddevmike]

Imagine a boring dystopia where everyone is given hallucinated tasks from LLMs that may in some crazy way be feasible but aren't, and you can't argue that they're impossible without being fired since leadership lacks critical thinking.

[joshstrange]

I’ve started to experience/see this and it makes me want to scream.

You can’t dismiss it out of hand (especially with it coming from up the chain) but it takes no time at all to generate by someone who knows nothing about the problem space (or worse, just enough to be dangerous) and it could take hours or more to debunk/disprove the suggestion.

I don’t know what to call this? Cognitive DDOS? Amplified Plausibility Attack? There should be a name for it and it should be ridiculed.

[alganet]

In corporate, you are _forced_ to trust your coworker somehow and swallow it. Specially higher-ups.

In free software though, these kinds of nonsense suggestions always happened, way before AI. Just look at any project mailing list.

It is expected that any new suggestion will encounter some resistance, the new contributor itself should be aware of that. For serious projects specifically, the levels of skepticism are usually way higher than corporations, and that's healthy and desirable.

[petesergeant]

> Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight.

I would find it very insulting if someone did this to me, for sure, as well as a huge waste of my time.

On the other hand I've also worked with some very intransigent developers who've actively fought against things they simply didn't want to do on flimsy technical grounds, knowing it couldn't be properly challenged by the requester.

On yet another hand, I've also been subordinate to people with a small amount of technical knowledge -- or a small amount of knowledge about a specific problem -- who'll do the exact same thing without ChatGPT: fire a bunch of mid-wit ideas downstream that you have already thought about, but you then need to spend a bunch of time explaining why their hot-takes aren't good. Or the CEO of a small digital agency I worked at circa 2004 asking us if we'd ever considered using CSS for our projects (which were of course CSS heavy).

[sltr]

Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority". (not a typo)

An LLM said it, so it must be true.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/

[alluro2]

A friend experienced a similar thing at work - he gave a well-informed assessment of why something is difficult to implement and it would take a couple of weeks, based on the knowledge of the system and experience with it - only for the manager to reply within 5 min with a screenshot of an (even surprisingly) idiotic ChatGPT reply, and a message along the lines of "here's how you can do it, I guess by the end of the day".

I know several people like this, and it seems they feel like they have god powers now - and that they alone can communicate with "the AI" in this way that is simply unreachable by the rest of the peasants.

[itslennysfault]

At a company I used to work at I saw the CEO do this publicly (on slack) to the CTO who was an absolute expert on the topic at hand, and had spent 1000s of hours optimizing a specific system. Then, the CEO comes in and says I think this will fix our problems (link to ChatGPT convo). SOO insulting. That was the day I decided I should start looking for a new job.

[masfuerte]

You should send him a chatGPT critique of his management style.

(Or not, unless you enjoy workplace drama.)

[windward]

It's the modern equivalent of sending a LMGTFY link, except the insult is from them being purely credulous and sincere

[guappa]

My company hired a new CTO and he asked chatgpt to write some lengthy documents about "how engineering gets done in our company".

He also writes all his emails with chatgpt.

I don't bother reading.

Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man.

[latexr]

> Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man.

Why is that odd? From the rest of your description, it seems entirely predictable.

[JonChesterfield]

That's directly lethal, in a limited sympathy with engineers that don't immediately head for the exit sort of fashion. Best of luck

[nijave]

Especially when you try to correct them and they insist AI is the correct one

Sometimes it's fun reverse engineering the directions back into various forum, Stack Overflow, and documentation fragments and pointing out how AI assembled similar things into something incorrect