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Why are so many companies pushing for AI adoption by developers?

6 points| alcasa | 6 months ago

Based on public news and stuff happening at my workplace, there seems to be a real or at least told narrative, that developers need to take up AI as a new technology.

But why? If AI is good, adoption won't require convincing, it would be harder to prevent developers from using AI in places you wouldn't want them to use it.

13 comments

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salawat|6 months ago

Because they see AI as the gateway to your invitation of course. Money only cares about money/ROI. A bunch of tech CEOs in finance circles have hyped up AI to drive adoption, more "conventional" business/management types buy into the hype and dive in. Do pilot programs. If it works, great, start planning the downsize... If it doesn't...well it will work, so why even spend the cycles thinking on it?

salawat|6 months ago

s/invitation/obviation

techpineapple|6 months ago

Of course people will need convincing. People hate change.

JohnFen|6 months ago

That's not it at all. Past advances in developer tools didn't need this sort of force-feeding because developers saw the value and willingly adopted them. The "forcing" was the developers demanding the tools from their employers.

This time, it's exactly backwards. I posit that's because there is no clear value in excess of the costs with these tools.

jamil7|6 months ago

I recently saw a PM newsletter that was detailing how to encourage and "reward" LLM adoption in teams which also kind of stuck out to me. These are genuinely useful but limited tools that now have to live up to huge promises and valuations so tech leadership is trying to force adoption.

malfist|6 months ago

Can you imagine having to "reward" folks for using IDEs? Or Syntax Highlighting? Or version control? Intellisense?

drweevil|6 months ago

tl;dr: those of us not heavily invested in AI need "convincing" because the technology is almost all down-side with little up-side.

We can start with bosses imposing which tools we use. We usually don't like that. Especially when these mandates are accompanied by unreasonable expectations (productivity will increase by 50%! You'll become a 10x developer!). Now you're under even more pressure than before, with no real possibility of satisfying those expectations. Makes for a wonderful work environment, I'm sure.

Follow that up with the extremely negative social externalities AI brings to the table: resource exploitation in poorer neighborhoods, labor exploitation in poor nations, etc. In WV, where I live, the legislature have already stripped communities of their political rights, with the goal of being more "data-center friendly", which to me sums up AI rather nicely: an anti-democratic, anti-people, big-investor-friendly technology.

Disposal8433|6 months ago

I would have given the same answer. I try every tool out there and I have the experience to know if its useful. I'm an old fart but I'm smart enough to understand that I get great value from my paid software (fonts, software, or subscriptions like JetBrains).

Managers don't know how to code and now give us ridiculous technical advice. We know that they only care about money and don't understand a thing about features.

Last but not least, we get twice more work for the same salary. There is no world where this make sense.