“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

At work today we had a little presentation about Claude Cowork. And I learned someone used it to write a C (maybe C++?) compiler in Rust in two weeks at a cost of $20k and it passed 99% of whatever hell test suite they use for evaluating compilers. And I had a few thoughts.

• 99% pass rate? Maybe that's super impressive because it's a stress test, but if 1% of my code fails to compile I think I'd be in deep shit.
• 20k in two weeks is a heavy burn. Imagine if what it wrote was... garbage.
• "Write a compiler" is a complete project plan in three words. Find a business project that is that simple and I'll show you software that is cheaper to buy than build. We are currently working on an authentication broker service at work and we've been doing architecture and trying to get everyone to agree on a design for 2 months. There are thousands of words devoted to just the high level stuff, plus complex flow diagrams.
• A compiler might be somewhat unique in the sense that there are literally thousands of test cases available - download a foss project and try to compile it. If it fails, figure out the bug and fix it. Repeat. The ERP that your boss wants you to stand up in a month has zero test coverage and is going to be chock full of bugs — if for no other reason than you haven't thought through every single edge case and neither has the AI because lots of times those are business questions.
• There is not a single person who knows the code base well enough to troubleshoot any weird bugs and transient errors.

I think this is a cool thing in the abstract. But in reality, they cherry picked the best possible use case in the world and anyone expecting their custom project is going to go like this will be lighting huge piles of money on fire.

Man, corporate layoffs kill productivity completely for me.

Once you do layoffs >50% of the job becomes performative bullshit to show you’re worth keeping, instead of building things the company actually needs to function and compete.

And the layoffs are random with a side helping of execs saving the people they have face time with.

From reading all the comments from the community, it’s amazing (yet not surprising) that all these managers have fallen for the marketing of all these LLMs. These LLMs have gotten people from all levels of society to just accept the marketing without ever considering the actual results for their use cases. It’s almost like the sycophant nature of all LLMs has completely blinded people from being rational just because it is shiny and it spoke to them in a way no one has in years.

On the surface level, LLMs are cool no doubt, they do have some uses. But past that everyone needs to accept their limitations. LLMs by nature can not operate the same as a human brain. AGI is such a long shot because of this and it’s a scam that LLMs are being marketed as AGI. How can we attempt to recreate the human brain into AGI when we are not close to mapping out how our brains work in a way to translate that into code, let alone other more simple brains in the animal kingdom.

I can’t wait until billionaires realize how worthless they actually are without people doing everything for them

Who?

Uhhh, Block is the the parent company of Square (formerly known as Square Up). This is actually a huge company, not some little side thing.

Is that thumbnail a scene from 12 monkeys?

I had a meeting with my boss today about my AI usage. I said I tried using Claude 4.5, and I was ultimately unimpressed with the results, the code was heavy and inflexible. He assured me Claude 4.6 would solve that problem. I pointed out that I am already writing software faster than the rest of the team can review because we are short staffed. He suggested I use Claude to review my MRs.