this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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My company is strongly pushing AI. There are lot of experiments, demos, and effort from decently smart people about integrating it into our workflows. There are some impressive victories that have been made with AI tooling producing some things fast. I am not in denial about this. And the SE department is tracking improved productivity (as measured by # of tickets being done, I guess?)

The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam. I think it's obvious how google search results are spam, how spam songs and videos are being produced, etc. But even bad results from AI that have to be discarded, IMO, are spam.

And that isn't even getting into all massive amounts of theft to train the data, or the immense amounts of electricity it takes to do training and inference, as well as run, all this crap. Nor the psychosis being inflicted onto people who emplace their trust into these systems. Nor the fact that these tools are being used to empower authoritarian regimes to track vulnerable populations, both here (in the USA) and abroad. And all this AI shit serves to enrich the worst tech moguls and to displace people like artists and people like myself, a programmer.

I'm literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter, and that AI has been unambiguously proven in the industry, so the time for wondering about it, experimenting with it, or opposing it is over. The only fault and flaw is my (i.e. any given SE's) unwillingness to adapt and onboard.

Looking for advice from people who have had to navigate similar crap. Because I feel like I'm at a point where I must adapt or eventually get fired.

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[–] artifex@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago

Make a list of the tasks you hate doing or are repetitive, time consuming and not normally automateable. Then see if any of them are a good fit for an AI workflow.

[–] cadekat@pawb.social 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It definitely sounds like you've already decided to find AI useless regardless of what it can do, but on the chance that I can maybe change your mind a little bit...

I'm a huge AI skeptic myself, at least compared to my coworkers. Almost everything it spits out has been incorrect for me, except in very narrow use cases.

First, I find it useful to find links to actual documentation for tools/libraries/languages I am completely unfamiliar with. The examples and text it generates are usually poor, but it can do a decent job of finding webpages.

Second, I've found it good at guided code reviews. It is no substitute for a real human review, but adding an AI pass before you open a pull request can knock off some of the low hanging fruit.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

It definitely sounds like you’ve already decided to find AI useless regardless of what it can do

On the contrary. I've seen impressive time-savers be accomplished with it, just as I've seen it fail at times. But it's not about finding it useless. It's about how I hate it, but also changing my mindset to effectively adopt it.

Second, I’ve found it good at guided code reviews. It is no substitute for a real human review, but adding an AI pass before you open a pull request can knock off some of the low hanging fruit.

We do this automatically, now, on pull requests

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Treat it like an especially junior dev that just graduated University.

It knows simple boilerplate stuff pretty well, but never trust it implicitly.

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam.

You are describing one type of AI, that being Generative AI. Even more specifically, Generative AI from publicly trained models, examples being ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. If you hate those, don't use those. This isn't the only AI that exists.

We're getting into data science here, but you can build and train Machine Learning models exclusively on your own data. So no theft/spam contamination here. If your needs are in the Generative AI space, you could even build and deploy your own Fine Tuned model from your own data on top of one of the public models, so it would have knowledge of your business or industry.

All AI incarnations are just tools. You don't start with a tool. You start with a problem to solve, and you use a tool to assist or make it better. So the beginning of this journey is asking the question: "What problem are you trying to solve?"

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 days ago

Pull up your big boy pants and use it?

Or don't. And if you're right about it not being a productivity boost then your numbers will reflect that.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 0 points 2 days ago

ai is another abstraction of search. When integrated into software it can perform many things that individual plugins could before but it is one and done. If you had an intern that would prep work for you or look over what you are doing to identify errors you would likely consider yourself lucky but you know you have to evaluate everything they do. Its kinda the same. If you take away the energy usage I would be relatively fine with ai usage. You ask it something. It provides and answer along with references to where it got the information. You can read over the references and if everything looks good you saved yourself some time over a standard search. Personally my writing is way casual and full of bad grammar and misspellings unless I make drafts and review multiple times. ai being able to fix up what I write such that all the spelling and grammar is correct and maybe a bit more polite. thats great.

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