they cut our copilot budget to 19€ per person (you can request more. but of course it’s a hassle)
they still insist AI the future and more AI is better. they are just now shifting the blame to employees: “you need to think more about how you use it”, “you cannot just throw tokens at a problem”, etc
two months ago I got an email from a manager asking me why my AI spending was so low.
Wait, we’re not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.
So next, you’ll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.
This just in, Management are complete morons. Film at 11.
This. You’d almost think people are dumb enough to blame bad management decisions on software.
Trend chasing upper class idiots
At our company, 12 months ago they said everyone wasn’t using enough AI. They even made a leaderboard to see who was using the most tokens in the business and encouraged more and more.
A couple of months ago, everyone’s AI spend was restricted to $100/month without warning. Entire workflows broken overnight because people had built theirs around Claude skills that used stupid amounts of tokens.
Now they’re starting layoffs. Go figure.
It’s weird - competent management wouldn’t require employees to fly helicopters to work without flight training, but many managers somehow think, “Everybody use AI now,” makes sense.
Remember when chatgpt first went viral and everyone said that “prompt engineer will be the new career path”. So, how’s that going?
Now let’s be honest here, work slop is absolutely nothing new. I’ve had coworkers who will spend countless hours on a fucking useless “walking deck” which is the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard of. Its just a slideshow full of pretty pictures that morons like but says almost nothing useful. Just departmental marketing wank. At least slop is more democratic now, I can pull one of these turds together in 5 minutes, impress the dipshits that like pretty graphics that look good, but mean nothing.
January: We’re going AI native, please use AI as much as possible.
March: Everyone needs to attend workshops on how to maximize AI productivity.
July: Some models are only available for special (properly justified) cases. Speak to your manager. Turns out that some people did everything (even commits) with top cost models.
August: Ok, we’re setting some limits on token usage, due to some people spending 1000% over the average.
September: we are creating additional frameworks and limits to AI use.
It took a bit of time for the actual AI cost/benefit to reach the top management and put some hard numbers in contrast with the hype machine, but it’s happening.
Everyone who was paying attention even a little bit has known this would be the trajectory from the beginning. And we haven’t even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.
Do we work at the same company??
I think this was the standard management reaction across all the companies that embraced AI as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
They thought it was their ticket to fire everybody, and the more they made you use it the sooner they could fire you.
Soon, the guys upstairs will realise that the real savings are in replacing the middle management with agents, not replacing the workers. Fingers crossed.
That will just become a different kind of hell
I don’t doubt that for a second, my friend.
C-Suit are herd animals. Same schools, same country clubs, same conference. They all are formed the same. And they don’t take advise from people who earn a few orders of magnitude less.
Fortunately, the people above them care about numbers, and these don’t add up.
My company is at the July stage. Who knew giving people unrestricted access to Claude enterpise with no training would blow through budgets in days
I feel like we’re co-workers, with how perfectly that timeline matched the day-job’s progression.
We’re at “did you take the seminar on looping that uses tokens like a firehouse so you can use less tokens? Why are you using too little (/not enough) tokens, and why is it not magically 10x-ing all of your (fucking ansible) config?” Or some shit.
Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking
What a loop…
This is the thing that drives me absolutely nuts with how most people use LLMs at work. I’m fully capable of asking the LLM to create slop, I need others to actually check and ensure their documentation is useful and correct before communicating it with others.
Management spent two years demanding everyone use AI, then discovered everyone was using AI. Now they’re shocked the office is a conveyor belt of hallucinated PowerPoints reviewed by other bots. The real productivity breakthrough will be executives learning that buying subscriptions isn’t a business strategy.
I just wish my company would start hiring again. I have been using the AI out of necessity, because we are short-staffed in certain areas. I’ve asked several times, directly, how much my AI use is costing and nobody is in a position to know. It’s certainly helped in some areas but I want to build a case that hiring a college grad or two can help more…
Careful they might just hire two AI using interns to replace you. Maybe bad mouth how much the AI is making mistakes and get them to make you stop using it and then ask for help when production slows.
Ernst and Young say 36% of companies using AI have experienced catastrophic incidents.
Hopefully some of them go bankrupt. That would be a stellar way to get rid of some bad management.
This really is just like every other management trend. They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work. AI can really help with a lot of mundane tasks that everyone dreads doing. And it can really help at finding information in an ocean of docs and pages. But… you have to invest in training people jow to use it, building the internal tools to make it effective, and in getting the garbage out of your existing docs. It can also be used for coding of course, but the ecosystem needed to do that well requires even more investment in basics. The fact that tech writers who know how to work with and document for AI aren’t being hired by the bundle tells you how wrong soo many companies are about their approach. Bonus points, if used well, AI doesn’t have to be obscenely expensive. At least until they start charging what it actually costs.
They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work.
That sounds like when a company I used to work for first found out about Agile…
And like every company that hears about agile these days.
What a shocking turn of events! If only something like this could have been foreseen and prevented!
