Remind them that copyright cannot be enforced on anything AI-written.

AI is inevitable in many fields but as usual people expect way too much from it. It’s a tool, not a magic wand. I agree with you that it is useful and even powerful when used by somebody that understands when it is useful. But it is dangerous when wielded by somebody that doesn’t. As others have said, let your boss vibe code themselves into a corner and leave them to vibe code themselves out of it. They will try to deflect that it is your job to solve it though so you better come up with a strategy to handle that. Be sure to have more people on your side in this venture.

Secondarily, install a chatbot with the instructions to derive essence as a bullet list from your boss wall of texts. If they make their life easier with LLM, so can you. If there are misunderstandings it’s either all just ghosts in the machine or a failure from your boss to communicate clearly.

For centuries, we spent less effort consuming content than it took to produce the content.

Good teammates and content producers understand that their content needs to have an intrinsic value and benefits beyond the mere existence of content.

If you make your team 10x slower by sending LLM generated 10 page content instead of a one liner, you are actively hindering the team.

Efficiency is not just production of content (slop or not), but the overall system. That’s why the corpo speak has always been such a waste. Too many words to say nothing in a mandatory all-hands. Now the dial is up to 11 with the same time waste everywhere

Our internal slack channels contain more and more AI-written posts, which makes me think: Thank you for throwing this wall of text on me and n other people. Now, n people need to extract the relevant information, so you are able to “save time” not writing the text yourself. Nice!!!

I think this is one of your best bets as far as getting a real policy change. Bring it up, mention that posts like that may take less time to “write”, but that they’re almost always obnoxiously verbose, contain paragraphs that say essentially nothing, and take far longer to read than a hand-typed message would. The argument that one person is saving time at the expense of dozens (?) of people losing time may carry a lot of weight, especially if these bosses are in and read the same Slack channel.

Past that I’d just let things go as they are, and take every opportunity to point out when AI made a problem, or made a problem more difficult to solve (while downplaying human-created problems).

I had a manager who pushed AI a lot. When he left, all the pressure to use it seemed to die down. So maybe it’s just a couple of people creating this environment and if you can get away with avoiding them it’s better.

The problem with AI code we saw is that often no human has actually looked at it. During reviews you won’t check every line and you’ll have to trust much of the code that seems to do obvious things. But that assumes it was written by a human you also trust. When that human hasn’t reviewed the code either, you end up with code no one in the company has seen (and may not even know how it works).

I am making similar experiences, but is is not as bad as you are describing it yet. We have a new member in the team who is not a developer by himself, but he has gotten the task to make our way of working more professional (we are mainly scientists and not primarily software engineers, so that’s a good thing).

His first task was to create programming guidelines and standards. He created 8 pages of LLM generated text and example non sense code. He honestly put a lot of effort in it, but of course there are a lot of things in it that are wrong. But the worst thing is the wall of text. You are nailing it - it is my task now to go through this whole thing and extract the relevant information. It sucks. And I am afraid that soon I will need to review more and more low quality MRs generated by people who have little experience in programming.

enjoy the ride, look for a new job, so you’re not surprised when the buisness dies due to declining quality or a customer lawsuit suing for damages.

The best case for AI is that can heroicly solve problems that shouldn’t exist in a first place in a well-managed company.

It can structure unstructured data, that should be structured. It can do simple coding where aboslutly no coder could be reached. It can sum up the red tape and produce red tape to meet complience requirement that were where created for the sake of the red tape alone.

If the work is important, it shoudn’t be done by AI. If its busy work, it shouldn’t exist in a first place. No one would need AI to summarize anything if everything was writen clearly.

And thats best case scenario when you don’t count halucynations, errors, edge cases, company specyfic context - things that results in task taking more time after all the “oh it produced something and it looks good at a glance” cloud fall down.

If your company is getting a lot of value from AI than your company is trash.

Let him “vibe-code” himself into a problem, then tell him you can’t fix the mess he done did.

I haven’t had a similar experience yet, but maybe some if your collegues feel the same way? You could write a letter stating your concerns and let anyone sign who agrees and then send it to your manager. Also, I’d like to add that under German law AI Output can not be copyrighted. You can only claim coownership or something. Maybe that could be interedting to your managers?

My teamleads too. They tried to sell a whole application that they vibecoded and marketik strategie was “fully ai generated!”

Endure the next year or so, until it pops and there will be a massive need for senior devs for fixing the slop machine.

A small company this level of cooked and immature leadership may not have the resources to recover long term from the damage. Even if the bubble pops on them in a year.

I’d start looking for alternatives now, before it becomes urgent.

Let me give you a little parable.

There once was a juggler, who could juggle with three balls all day. Then someone from the audience threw a fourth ball, and he kept going. Someone threw a glass, then a flaming torch, and he kept going, occasionally burning his hands. Seeing he could do it, someone throws a machete, and the juggler almost never cuts his fingers keeping all those things in the air. A chainsaw gets added, and an open bottle of bleach, and occasionally the juggler gets his hair caught or spills some bleach, but he keeps going. As he keeps going, people keep adding more and more things. Eventually it’s too much, and it all comes crashing down, killing the juggler and several members of the audience and destroying all the objects in the air.

On the next street corner, a juggler stands with three balls. Someone from the audience throws in a fourth. He steps aside and lets it fall to the floor, happily juggling three balls.

Agentic use of AI didn’t really work well enough until December of last year. The models and tools just improve that fast. Codex/claude (or opencode with the same top models) is what you’d need for it.

You still need to plan and define clear specifications for the model. Spend 80% of your time planning and breaking down the job into steps and it’ll be pretty self-going from there.

Of course, this works best for common frameworks and solved problems or logical problems. React/node developers can easily 10x their output, and get it done better than they would by hand.

I’m working more with empirical development, so most of my time goes into studying environments and adapting to it. I get most benefit out of having agents read through logs and figure out what happened. It gets it right maybe half the time, but it’s a good rubber ducky even when it goes wrong. I’d say it 2-3xes my output. But I can probably improve my usage, too.

But yeah, code review is where it hurts. If it’s slop, it just takes so many rounds to get it right. Even when it’s good, it’s just so much code to review.