> In the case that the technology continues to make incremental gains like this, your company does not need generative AI for the sake of it. You will know exactly why you need it if you do, indeed, need it. An example of something that has actually benefited me is that I keep track of my life administration via Todoist, and Todoist has a feature that allows you to convert filters on your tasks from natural language into their in-house filtering language. Tremendous! It saved me learning a system that I'll use once every five years. I was actually happy about this, and it's a real edge over other applications. But if you don't have a use case then having this sort of broad capability is not actually very useful. The only thing you should be doing is improving your operations and culture, and that will give you the ability to use AI if it ever becomes relevant. Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.
This is purely wishful thinking. We're good at making rigorous well-organised stuff and we hope that will somehow continue to be a useful skill. But actually there's no evidence that a half-baked bullshit generator isn't going to outperform carefully written documentation, to the point that carefully writing documentation becomes a waste of resources.
> I swear to God, I am going to study, write, network, and otherwise apply force to the problem until those resources are going to a place where they'll accomplish something for society instead of some grinning clown's wallet.
Bet. Go on, actually have a go at doing this. You'll find it's much harder than you think and what looks like success will usually turn out to be actively counterproductive.
If you write the documentation as you write the code its not very time consuming since you kind of have to write up good notes anyhow to roadmap what the heck you are doing next. One issue is people are lazy and often code first, document later, which becomes a slog for a bad end product that chatgpt might outperform.
This is purely wishful thinking. We're good at making rigorous well-organised stuff and we hope that will somehow continue to be a useful skill. But actually there's no evidence that a half-baked bullshit generator isn't going to outperform carefully written documentation, to the point that carefully writing documentation becomes a waste of resources.
> I swear to God, I am going to study, write, network, and otherwise apply force to the problem until those resources are going to a place where they'll accomplish something for society instead of some grinning clown's wallet.
Bet. Go on, actually have a go at doing this. You'll find it's much harder than you think and what looks like success will usually turn out to be actively counterproductive.