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points by keiferski 3 days ago | 0 comments

I think AI has also devalued a lot of work that previously might have been "mundane" but still felt like an accomplishment once you got it done. But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.

So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.

[–] snarfy 3 days ago

Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.

[–] 10111001 2 days ago

> Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.

And hopefully it will to that to all labor, so we can finally crumple up the workers and throw them into the bin too!

And those greedy workers shouldn't complain, they should be happy about the change! Now they can have as much of the stuff we throw in the bin as they want!

[–] kvemkon 2 days ago

Aluminum was and is still something we cannot afford to waste.

14 years ago: "The Battle for Raw Materials - A Company on the Hunt for Aluminum" (DE)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd1Fern6JQ8

few days ago: "Dispute Over Aluminum Scrap: European Industry Calls for Export Restrictions" (DE)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucgyfee6eNk

[–] captainclam 3 days ago

100%.

And a corollary being that without any time spent on the "mundane", almost every single aspect of the work becomes the genuinely consequential decision-making steps.

Which I find exhausting.

[–] core-utility 3 days ago

I see this directly. I'm an engineer but part of that is doing non-engineer work like making powerpoints, whitepapers, and generic work that's necessary but that I would delegate to someone else if I were high enough on the totem pole.

AI gives me the ability to do that stuff faster so I can focus more on the 20% and the quality of what I'm doing, not the nuance of formatting a document.

[–] bagacrap 3 days ago

AI makes up for a lot of crap tooling, but is often worse than good tooling. In this case "good tooling" would be a document template or formatting language that is easy/fast to use. What I have seen AI do so far if you try to one shot a PowerPoint deck is underwhelming to say the least. (To say more: it looks like a word cannon was used to splatter text on slides with random positions, colors, and fonts.)

[–] dvfjsdhgfv 2 days ago

> powerpoints, whitepapers

Khm, ackshually... any documentation work is best not left to LLMs. They are excellent at generating many words with little value. Even sketching a doc and running through an LLM although a bit better than just a prompt "generate docs from this code" still suffers from similar problems. I prefer to write briefly, but doing it myself.

OTOH - formatting and other stuff not related to content, this is great to delegate, even though the results are often mediocre, but I really don't care about that at this point.

[–] matsemann 2 days ago

Just skip the powerpoint if you can't be bothered to create it. It's painfully obvious for anyone listening that the presenter didn't come up with or think through what they're talking about.

[–] abustamam 2 days ago

Not always an option if you're being required to make a PowerPoint. The content doesn't need to be AI generated. Just the organization of slides is a PITA and not a good use of my time.

[–] esalman 2 days ago

I have a completely different perspective on this.

During the day, I am using Opus 5.5 to develop solutions our team would never think was possible two years ago.

Ar night I am watching my 5yo learn how to read and do math. The sense of accomplishment he shows being able to add double digits is contagious.

Nothing is mundane. One man's basic work is another man's magic. When we have appreciation for each other, we advance more as a species.

[–] adamddev1 2 days ago

> But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.

But what happens when the 20% quality margin that we lost aggregates over different layers of infrastructure and compounds into brokenness and chaos?

[–] Havoc 2 days ago

Same as the work produced by bad employees. Gets absorbed, fixed, ignored or thrown out.

It’s not like companies never shipped broken shit before AI