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- Hacker News
- My product manager has given me five paragraphs of requirement/ word salad generated by AI. I couldn't for my life understand what it meant , so I have used AI to list it down in simple English requirement end of the day it is adding an SDK.by magesh_magi1
- Pointing this is the new trending in my Linkedin feed. Same people that three months ago were saying "it's not (about) A, it's ...". Accountability died a long time ago.by rogerthis
- That's one of the most shocking realization from 2024 onwards. Things that could have fire you in 2014 is now justified because "AI".by shenanigoo
- > Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.
Clearly Opus 5 was an overreaction to this then.
by fidotron - It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
Cal Newport was right.
by aduffy - > Models are excellent at code
Models are infinitely willing to code. The code they produce makes me want to pour one out for Knuth.
by thechao - This tracks with my observation that upper management types in essentially every domain are pampered assholes who haven't interacted with the real world in decades, if ever.
Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.
by dtj1123 - It’s just amazing we keep using the word “leaders” when they’re clearly not.by JSR_FDED
- Since they hire, command work and fire, they kinda are.by fzeindl
- Around 2015, my boss got permission from corporate to take me and a few of my coworkers to a leadership conference for a day. It was setup at a church and had religious theming around it, and a lot of "leadership values" were communicated. It was the usual fare of responsibility, accountability, truth and trust you'd expect, mixed with the religious overtones you'd also expect. But what I didn't expect is how trite this fictional narrative would prove to be.
I think about that a lot now, and how my religious upbringing was bombarded with this messaging (in a good way). And how much of the same world that previously claimed espouse it has complete turned their backs on it in such a short time.
Is it dead or did it ever exist at all? At least we don't seem to pretend to have higher values anymore. If we even have leaders at all, they are not measured by the yardsticks we used to make.
- The most glaring and revealing example of this is travis kalanick talking about QM. It should be embarrassing and disqualifying for leadership to be so easily fooled, but he just got a shit ton of money for his new startup
"I'll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics. And we're approaching what's known. And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.". And that was mid 2025, when the models were much much worse.
by chermi - > In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
by bonoboTP - > There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort.
Quoting the article...
"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."
If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.
The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.
So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).
by lo_zamoyski - I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.by swader999
- Having experienced a customer support AI today that whatever option you picked initially led to the AI, which had the rigid helpfulness of a McDonalds script of "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries, I feel a popcorn machine is a good investment. Be the stage that office interactions will be reduced to, I'll get my AI to get onto your AI's suggestion and get back to you with an answer. I did have a good chat with an AI a few weeks back (Googles) were I challanged by asking it to do a picture of its best dream and then its worst nightmare, then used those to pull it apart as it went from some extreme to another, in the end it ended up with its ideal being an AI only world, and picked Europa as its home - scary on many levels, yet a perfectly acceptable and understandable response.by Zenst
- Get yourself one of those popcorn microwave bowls: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71mA19sd51L.jpg
You get hot popcorn in ~2min without the need for a whole machine you will have to clean and maintain. I got one as a gimmick a few years ago and it has become one of our favorite evening snack
by dgellow - Don't be a meat proxy! See this all over the place, it's very frustrating and i've advocated for stopping this practice at my company!
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933 - https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
- At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
We are so ******, am I right?
by hellojomp - There are manifold objections to Locke on property or rather on the appropriation of alien nature into one’s own. This characterization of the theory is the real psychosisby applicative
- > a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
After many years of bashing myself for not being understood at the workplace, I now realize that I never questioned if leadership was actually competent.
If they want to work with engineers effectively they have to understand jargon, communication styles, they have to understand the big tradeoffs and requirements that comes with owning a codebase at least on a rudimentary level.
You can't just go to business school and effectively manage trains and railroads if you had no clue about them.
So if you don't know how to communicate effectively with engineers whom you are paying for solving technical issues and not for their eloquence you are not competent.
We should stop apologizing for our existing when we try tell our bosses not to run into an iceberg, just because ChatGPT told them: "You're absolutely correct! The ship you built is stronger than the iceberg as it is made of metal and ice is just water.".
by shenanigoo - > At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
I think that people in general need to be better at receiving information that isn't perfectly pitched to them. It is a useful life skill to be able to understand the substance of someone's argument, and to look past the superficial way that it is presented. Postel's law applied to human communication.
Someone can be very frustrated and angry, and it can be upsetting to hear how they're presenting their argument, but they can be correct.
Another person can also whisper everything you want to hear in your ears, but lead you down the wrong path.
In a well-functioning society, I would think our senior leadership would be experienced and actually good at doing this and it would be expected of them. Flipping that around and blaming the subordinate for how they've pitched the message is backwards and probably not societally healthy.
Agreed, we are definitely ******.
by dualvariable - C-suites barely had a grip on reality before AI came in and started yes and-ing everything :(
It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything
- Pretend for a second that you're in a position of trying to run a successful business. Congrats, you're a c-suite executive now. Of course, you are free to define "successful" by whatever criteria you want, but not going bankrupt probably needs to be downstream of them.
Notice that whatever your goals are, they don't automatically serve the interests and per concerns of all your employees. Are you now delusional, evil, ruled by greed?
Running a smooth operation mostly just makes for really boring news. You should perhaps factor in survivorship bias of narratives into your views of the world.
by xelxebar - C-suites have no grip on reality, because their subordinates are afraid of telling them truth. The subordinates just want to look better in the boss's eyes, and are afraid to be replaced.
The more levels the org chart has, the more pronounced the effect may be.
by nine_k - "74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights"
it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else
never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved
I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse
by paimapi - > it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else.
I believe this counts as having “more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues”
by MontagFTB - C* can mean anything.
The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second.
I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month.
I fixed the SQL query, the problem was gone forever.
The same CTO got lulled into some weird talks with some AWS Account Manager for no reason. He told me what we should do and i explained to him how all of this (nicely of course) doesn't correlate to what we have, do and need.
I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.