alt Hacker News> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer.
That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.
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There's an old computing maxim: GIGO. It used to mean "garbage in, garbage out" meaning that if you put garbage into a computer, then the output was garbage. Nowadays, GIGO means "garbage in, gospel out" meaning that no matter how bad the input was, the output was to be treated as The Word of God.
> That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.
The 'AI-generated pseudo-spec' is becoming a massive productivity killer. Non-technical managers prompt an LLM, get a highly confident 5-page document with chosen libraries, and think they've done 80% of the work. But as a developer, you now have to spend hours debugging and debunking hallucinated architectures just to prove why the AI's approach doesn't fit the existing codebase. It completely shifts the burden of actual product management into AI-babysitting for the dev team.
>That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).
Maybe he was trying to say "look, when I can look this up, it means that you can too, i won't put any effort into it, because i pay you, but if i can use AI, so can you."
Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.
Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.
You'd be surprised how many "scale-up"'s are owned by genuine idiots. I don't even mean inexperienced people, just people that - if you were to meet them for the first time - seem like they are fucking idiots. The type that recently figured out you can tie your shoe instead of tripping over them.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
At my company, non technical Managers (including marketing folks) are posting Claude and ChatGPT responses in bug tickets with the "fix" for the bug. No explanation of what the expected vs actual behavior is, just AI slop telling me how to fix it. Soooo helpful.
> psychotic
Probably more under-developed than psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a sales pitch for the thing I was trying to build for him. He was always pitching for new business, and seemed to struggle to get out of 'sales mode'. I have no doubt that if I were working for him now, he'd be pointing me to an LLM in response to any question.