ssivark 10 hours ago

If I have decent autocomplete where I type half the characters and the AI predicts the other half that technically satisfies this metric.

Notice the loophole: there’s no qualification of how much problem context the AI started from. Most of the problem -> code “work” would still be done by a human in that situation — even if technically 50% of the code is “AI generated” [because the human did all the hard work of generating the context necessary for those tokens, including the preceding tokens of code].

As the saying goes… lies, damned lies, and statistics.

  • AndrewKemendo 7 hours ago

    > there’s no qualification of how much problem context the AI started from

    Infer it from the article:

    “as much as 30% to 50% of the company’s work is now completed by AI”

    There. That’s not nothing.

    You can and should call bs on all corporate claims, but this idea that coding agents at scale don’t work or is just total fluff is just wrong.

    What I’m seeing is that people over 25 who like to write code and have spent their lives “perfecting” their environment and code generation process, can’t stand that businesses prefer lower quality code that’s created faster and cheaper than their “perfect” code.

    Software engineers (and engineers generally) are closer economically to day laborers than theoretical physicists - but we/they refuse to believe that.

    This is why unionization matters but you can’t unionize divas until they actually start losing jobs.

    • tuckerman an hour ago

      The big question is the work in question conceived of, designed, scoped, and then 30% to 50% of the doc/code written by a human and then finished by AI or is there some 30% to 50% of the work where all of that was owned by the AI.

      Both are useful, but the former situation is one that just makes good engineers more useful/in demand imho.

    • pier25 4 hours ago

      It's not about perfect code but maintainable code that can be debugged when (not if) things go wrong.

    • belter 6 hours ago

      AI is the intern now, still does 50% of the work, nobody trusts it with anything important, gets praised by the CEO for “transforming the business.” :-)

      • riku_iki 5 hours ago

        Many humans can't be trusted with important work too, that's why we have all job interviewing and performance review processes, which are messy, costly and inefficient.

        With AI, companies can built some rigid analytics/tests/benchmarks, which could be used at scale.

  • nunez 9 hours ago

    Funny, and ironically, enough, I turned off autocorrect on iOS after it moved to a GPT-2 model because it grew increasingly inaccurate the more I used it. (The Markov chain implementation that preceded it wasn't much better, though I remember autocorrect on iOS being significantly better many years ago.)

  • beefnugs 3 hours ago

    yeah no one is inserting into code commits "ai generated 46%"

    This guy asked his 20 developers, how many of you use ai? and 10 said yes. So he does the ceo thing and tells the world 50% oh my god we can fire so many people now!

bgwalter 13 hours ago

To my understanding Salesforce was already selling hot air, so their pivot to force Agentforce on other companies seems logical.

  • msgodel 12 hours ago

    In their defense it is a pretty nice CRM.

    But yeah this could probably be maintained by like five people.

    • ehutch79 10 hours ago

      I disagree on it being a good crm.

      A lot of my problems show up on lists like “25 falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”. These were things that were maybe acceptable in 1999, because they didn’t know better, but only having a single street line is a problem.

      I could rant, but half of it would be sales directors who have never used Salesforce shooting us in the foot.

      • nunez 9 hours ago

        It's Jira for sales. Infinitely customizable and reportable, but infinitely frustratable for us rank-and-file plebs.

        I haven't used an implementation of SFDC that I've liked yet.

      • busterarm 8 hours ago

        It's '00s era CRM and its main competition is Dynamics ('90s era CRM) and SAP ('80s era CRM)...

        Its customers need big enterprise and there isn't a lot of other competition in that space. Not stuff with an ecosystem of systems integrators buzzing around.

        If you don't need all that get Hubspot or Zoho or SugarCRM or something.

        • setsewerd 7 hours ago

          Re: HubSpot, not sure if you follow them closely but they've been making some big strides in recent years and imo are a lot more competitive for enterprise than they used to be. That, and they're not a dumpster fire of cobbled acquisitions like Salesforce has become.

    • bombcar 10 hours ago

      It’s Microsoft Access for the web, with PHPMyAdmin mixed in.

      Which, surprisingly, is a really necessary product and quite useful.

brianmcc 10 hours ago

Ah that distinct phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle where CEOs claim massive amounts of use of Technology X regardless of whatever the underlying reality is

  • v5v3 10 hours ago

    Yup, Salesforce is listed and ceo needs to keep it's share price pumped.

mdeslaur 9 hours ago

So I expect to pay less for his product now that his biggest cost has been cut in half.

tacone 9 hours ago

Did they fire half of their employees? Or are they laying around half of the time?

ofjcihen 3 hours ago

From a security perspective this tracks. I don’t mean that in a good way.

PVRR 14 hours ago

Is this really the new reality, that AI will increasingly replace the work of humans? A company is not just about getting work done, but also about shared values and cohesion, which no AI can generate.

  • pickledoyster 12 hours ago

    Or statements like these simply tell you more about the company and the true quality of work it's doing.

  • RiverCrochet 8 hours ago

    I spoke to my half-brother about this. He worked for a company up until the late 90's for almost 20 years, then got laid off. They offered him various programs to return to school and take a new career path, but he didn't want to do that, so it's really his fault. He has been bitter ever since.

    I showed him this post and he had the following to say about it:

    "Unless your company is a non-profit, then anything the company does is for the purpose of profit, and everything else is subordinate to that. A 'Puritan Work Ethic' culture makes people believe work has inherent value, so expressions of shared value, cohesion, culture, etc. are done to take advantage of that and convince people to work for less. So shared values and cohesion help manage salaries and wages, but if people end up not being needed, then those aren't needed."

    I don't know. If AI replaces jobs, or makes most of them "copy-paste what the AI said," what is the meaning of that?

    I asked him that, and he said this:

    "I guess everyone's gonna have to be blue collar now or join the military."

  • 01-_- 14 hours ago

    true! but all I know is that I'm seeing more and more great professionals, especially in the IT sector, being made redundant :(

  • ElevenLathe 4 hours ago

    Lots of workers would like companies to be like this, but its a prescriptive statement, not a descriptive one.

    In reality, we have a system that suppresses wages to the fullest extent possible, and it is getting more and more possible. If you would like "companies" to be like this, you'll need to join with others to build the power to make that happen. This might happen via traditional union organizing, creating alternative structures like worker co-ops to compete directly in the market with the AI slop factories, or via state-level interventions. Presumably all three tactics will be necessary (and possibly some other ones I can't think of or which haven't been invented yet), since the other side has pushed us into this spot using every tool they have access to, legal or not.

    It's not the 90s anymore -- we will need to get off our asses and organize if we're going to avoid the worst futures.

  • add-sub-mul-div 10 hours ago

    The workforce is made up mostly of mediocre people who want to do as little work as possible. Management is made up mostly of short term goal seekers who want to pay as little for labor as possible. There's no slowing the train that's going down this path.