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newsomix9xltoday at 4:02 AM3 repliesview on HN

Employees have no incentive to meaningfully implement AI to increase productivity, and if they do so, they have no reason to share it.

If AI means job cuts and not using AI means job cuts but no one really tracks AI impact that means performative adoption of AI is safest, and real gains are to be sandbagged as innate magic hand waving.

At my work I'm one of the few who says "I made this with Claude" and the near impossibility of using AI with internal email etc for security reasons means AI use is one-shot wonder oriented (for me, in my experience).

If AI usage was incentived with actual bonuses and praise it might go over better. So far I haven't seen that. Its just implicit threats.


Replies

agumonkeytoday at 10:10 AM

This was observed on first week for me. In the employee room, most people were all crazy about LLMs, looking at the prompt results in awe, "I can do my day in 1h easy..." . By the end of the week, group meetings were much more tame "yeah I can go a bit deeper than I would otherwise, surely saves me a few hours a week". And after the meeting was over these employees were already saying that they would never report the real productivity boost, because that would be suicide.. more trash talk will fill the void instead.

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asdf88990today at 12:53 PM

You’re underestimating the competitive ground and how these companies create an environment of do or die.

Once the talk of “we will be laying off people based on productivity in upcoming months” starts; probable go kamakazi.

gymbeauxtoday at 5:47 AM

Yes, I’ve found my coworkers won’t admit they had AI write their code in any sort of group setting yet they’ve all admitted it in private. The implication seems to be if AI is writing your code you’re lazy/incompetent/bad/not working anywhere near 40 hours/week. I for one would hate for our bosses to figure out we do probably ~16 hours of actual work per week. But we all “get our stuff done” (thanks to AI).