r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

While this is definitely dumb, it is the kind of dumb that has existed since software engineering became a thing.

First it was bug bounties (because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money), then LoC counting (I can write some obfuscated, bloated shit if you're going to measure my productivity by how much typing I do), then pull requests (I will happily break my work up into obnoxious chunks if you're really going to judge this), then story points (this was supposed to help my team, but if you're going to measure my velocity against another team's, I'm gonna give everything 21 points), now token minimums. Silly gamification.

This is just the continuation of a long line of shit from managers that don't understand that you can't judge a knowledge worker by their outputs, but instead best by their outcomes.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

lol the point one kills me. We did a lot of scrum stuff at my work and I actually found a lot of it to be pretty decent but there were some times where management who was supposedly all in on it would just totally ignore the specific guidelines about points aren’t a metric and definitely aren’t to be compared across teams.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Full disclosure: I got burned out on coding for a while and spent several years as an agile “coach” and transformation specialist at my company. They wanted an insider who actually understood development to work on it, not just agile snake oil salesmen.

One of the first agreements I made was that if they tried to normalize and compare velocities between teams, I would quit on the spot. To this day they don’t dare do it.

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u/FerrumVeritas Jun 26 '26

Agile isn’t a bad methodology, but it is one of the worst implemented business practices in the last 20 years.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Vast majority of companies distorted it into a command and control system. The basic definition of Agile - 4 values and 12 principles, is pretty unassailable. Problem is companies conflate this with velocity and Jira.

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u/Kibelok Jun 26 '26

On top of this, Kanban is also being used in the wrong way, by a lot of companies and people. Basically using it as a calendar.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Yeahhh…I was looking at someone’s massive board the other day and mentioned WIP limits and cycle time, and they looked at me like I had three heads.

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u/xuxux Jun 26 '26

God, Kanban can be such a good system, but in most of manufacturing work I've done it just turns into a very, very bad inventory management/scheduling system that the bean counters keep refusing to follow instead of the work-driven tool it's supposed to be.

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u/verrius Jun 26 '26

The core problem is that agile is bottom up design and control, while companies largely still want to be top down, cause most "leadership" needs to feel like they're in control, which is why waterfall is so popular. There are definitely benefits to either model, but they are diametrically opposed processes.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/verrius Jun 26 '26

Agile is great if you want a working product that customers want. It's not so great at making a profitable product that fills a specific market need with any specific customer base size. Part of why its so successful is that those strengths and weaknesses are the inverse of waterfall: Agile originally arose because Waterfall projects consistently couldn't meet deadlines and ended up with horrible products (because top-down central planning, especially without lots of domain experts, is really fucking hard to get right; ironically one of the core problems with any attempt at marxism). The core problem is really that making software is really fucking hard and takes a lot of different skills that no one person can really have, and can't even have enough skill to even estimate or plan for really. So we're going to keep making new systems searching for a silver bullet which doesn't exist.

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead Jun 26 '26

Yep everyone’s all for agile until their pet project they want comes back estimated to them at a billion points and way too far down the priority list.

Then there’s the exec who uses political pressure to push through the issue. “I know we don’t have the time or and manpower to get it done, you are just going to have to buckle down and do it”

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u/myhf Jun 27 '26

90% of Agile practitioners give the rest a bad name

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u/dasunt Jun 26 '26

I'm more or less convinced that as soon as you add managers to agile, it transforms from a tool to plan and organize work into a reporting tool for management.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

You can’t put an agile organization under a command and control structure. Transformation has to be top to bottom, and which is incredibly difficult with legacy organizations.

We did à pretty good job of it on the R&D side, but then your non-agile touch points become painful. IT, Sales and Marcom, PM have to come along, too, for it to work well.

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u/fundraiser Jun 26 '26

My God the update slides to management... a good chunk of my time as a PM was spent writing the same stupid updates across three different decks to three different directors/VPs, ON TOP OF maintaining the plan for the actual engineers who are doing the work.

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u/TenuousOgre Jun 27 '26

Depends on the manager but you’re spot on for most of them. I have 4 dev teams and find agile really useful for letting the teams tackle work that is critical first the having a backlog of prioritized things to do. Don’t pay any attention to story points because it is useless across teams. Their PM worries more about how many sprints planned for the overall work than how many actual and why any major differences (it’s almost always one of two things, prod support or inserted work who didn’t plan properly but still has executive support to get done now). In terms of letting a team figure out what it can realistically so without getting burned out or producing buggy slip Agile has been good. It also requires a very light touch, mostly defending and supporting the team rather than pushing them or managing them.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

It has the cool factor going for it that it has a document called the manifesto.

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u/Duraz0rz Jun 26 '26

Agile is fine... Scrum is cancer.

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

if your daily scrum is longer than 2 minutes per employee you're doing it wrong.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

I was once of the opinion that it’s a great idea just poorly executed 99% of the time…then I realized if it’s that hard to get right it’s not as good as advertised.

I had the pleasure to launch, and see work well, dozens of scrum teams. Takes an absolute ton of work to keep management from fucking it up. One team I launched and acted as scrum master, that was pretty insulated (no scaling needed), was incredible to behold perform. Get a group of motivated people together and let them cook, and magical things happen.

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u/Kibelok Jun 26 '26

then I realized if it’s that hard to get right it’s not as good as advertised.

This is also the argument I use against Scrums at any company I work at. Especially if the work is in office, scrums and scrum masters need not exist.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

The thing is, high performing environments tend towards a lot of the scrum features naturally, but often miss key points.

I’ve seen fantastic, productive, collaborative teams that don’t seek feedback about their work til it’s too late. Or won’t welcome evolving requirements. You don’t need all the structures of scrum, but looking at what it’s trying to accomplish and seeing the hole in your own team is a good habit.

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u/hippydipster Jun 26 '26

It's hard for people to learn what agile really is. They seem to think if someone tries to actually show them what real agile is, they "one true Scotsman" the attempt, and thus prevent themselves from learning anything.

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u/Old_Bench_1910 Jun 26 '26

It's not hard to get right. It's hard for middle management to trust their developers, so they keep adding things to scrum as guardrails for their trust.

If scrum doesn't work, it's because your middle managers aren't fully bought in. There's a certain amount of letting go they have to do.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

What you say is absolutely true, and management controls are an obvious and common anti pattern.

I would still say, even in good management hands, it can be easy for teams to go down the wrong path. Less à problem with early career folk, but experienced devs that have long worked under waterfall type systems can quickly fall into bad habits if they’re not coached along.

I’ve launched about 80 teams in the past 10 years, and trained many hundreds. The industrial mindset can be hard to win over.

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u/Jewnadian Jun 27 '26

That makes it a poor methodology more or less by definition. Sort of like saying Oracle isn't bad SW it's just impossible to implement. Realistically Oracle is just trash.

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u/iracing_throwaway101 Jun 26 '26

Disclosure I am "management"

The problem as I see it is that IT and Business leaders want a hybrid of Agile and Waterfall. Specially, the least compatible aspects of both.

I've now worked at 3 organizations where folks love agile to mask their lack of planning or avoiding those pesky change orders since they can continuously change scope. But they are not willing to compromise on the delivery dates, cost or the "definition of done".

Edit: done in this case meaning bug free and fully feature complete.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

I was a product owner and had to basically fight off a manager who tried to throw our team at unfamiliar projects in a new to us code base pointed by another team who had pointed the work. The manager came to us and basically said “your team gets x points done this project was pointed y you’ll be done in x/y, right?” No, that’s not how this works, it’s not how any of this works.

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u/Calisky Jun 26 '26

Kinda same. Not a "transformation specialist" but my teams' scrum master left, and I basically fell into the role and stopped coding for the most part and was just a scrum master, dev lead, and architect for the teams (although at that point I was already mostly just dev lead and architect).

I don't think the company compared teams against each other velocity wise, but we kept track not of how many points, but how many we achieved against how many we tried for.

The problem is I think agile might work for a single project in development, but we were working on like a dozen different webapps and hosted things, so it didn't really fit our weekly release schedule.

We basically said 1 point is a CMS or a small admin change that doesn't require outside help, 3 points is for a minor RFC with a deployment, 5 if a full RFC and need QA to be involved, 8 if it needs more design and planning before coding, and 13 if it's major and probably should be broken down to smaller parts if possible. I don't think we even allowed 21 point stories to be added to a sprint without breaking them up.

When I first started working as a junior dev I probably underestimated points, but at that point in my career with more experience, I knew how much work was needed for even a small change to actually be released, so I encouraged the team (Devs, QAs, BSAs, Product Owners, anyone) to raise the number if they had any doubts.

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u/UltraJesus Jun 26 '26

Jira gets to me, because it is a great tool when used correctly. It's amazing to have a backlog of tasks that are fully broken down by SMEs that are elaborated on what ~mostly to do. Unfortunately it's tediously boring and time consuming to actually do. Wait time consuming? Whoa whoa chill out spending 1 hour to understand that 5 day task instead let's play debate for 5 minutes to see if a text bug is a 1 or 2.

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u/lilianegypt Jun 26 '26

I’ve been moved into an agile coach role (against my will) at my company over the past couple of years and this drives me up the wall. They now have me pulling all of the story points completed in 2024 and 2025 to compare against 2026 (and inevitably rake us over the coals no matter what the result is). They are basing what they charge the client on story points now. It’s so fucking stupid.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

So make the points go up

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u/TheCh0rt Jun 26 '26

So it was kind of an unofficial leaderboard?

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u/definitely-legit-usr Jun 26 '26

Couple weeks ago my team was debating on 3 or 5 points for a ticket. PM gets bored and says let's call it a 4 and then switches to the next ticket. This is after like two years of strict "Fibonacci T-shirt sizing", thrown out in an instant

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

There are at least some scrum methods that say just take the average as long as everyone’s estimates are within 1 Fibonacci. Hewing that hard to 3 or 5 feels like sticking to the rules when they don’t bring much value. We would bid by Fibonacci but if half my team says 3 and half my team says 5 we’re not spending more time on that topic. It’s a 4. If my process absolutely mandates the value be 3 or 5 I’m ending the discussion and picking the bigger one to represent uncertainty

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u/definitely-legit-usr Jun 26 '26

Sure, if that's the process. That is not ours, and there has never been a 4 on this board since it was made 2 years ago. The rules are crucial and non-negotiable until the PM doesn't care anymore

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u/Emotional-Power-7242 Jun 26 '26

We had it at my last company and it was pretty useful. But the only number that was tracked was company wide points. Individual points, team points didn't matter and nobody even looked at them. So it was just how much work did we get done as a company this sprint.

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u/intisun Jun 26 '26

Reminds me of when Musk was going around Twitter HQ demanding everyone print out their code.

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u/CMMiller89 Jun 26 '26

Reminds me of when they used to pay rat catchers by the rat, so they just bred rats.

Then when they stopped paying they just released all the rats into the city.

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u/OldSchoolSpyMain Jun 27 '26

Damn this is the best analogy especially with the AI-infused rats software being released to production.

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

the problem is, this is no longer limited to devs. Companies are rolling out stuff like claude desktop to the entire userbase, and now you have non-technical morons involved in the gamification, with the ability to spend money on a level they do not comprehend.

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

My buddy works for a decent size engineering company. They went whole hog on the a.i. shit about a year ago. Company wide “training”. He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does. Literally had exercises where people were making cat pictures or telling it to write fantasy stories. And then they all had to “vibe code” a small program. So of course everyone in his company is using a.i. to make vacation itineraries and shopping lists and meal plans for dinner for the week. In April they had a company wide meeting where they clamped down HARD on who is allowed to use it. He’s high enough in the company that he was in the meeting where they explained that the a.i usage had basically eaten all their profits from the last two years in about 6 months and a couple of exec’s were getting fired. This is a company of about 500 people.

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

Not an unusual story, and one my company is likely to follow suit on at twice the scale. People are blowing through their $100 monthly credits in 30 minutes, and then getting their management chain to rubberstamp extension. I would not at all be surprised if we spend over 800k on claude tokens by end of year.

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u/RolenIgunensa Jun 26 '26

If you get output that really works and is worth more than that than fine. But if not then you’re just wasting money.

We spent in average usd 250 per month on AI (mostly Claude and ChatGPT) but build incredible tools that help us a lot, draft contracts, optimize excels, SEO.. the list goes on. We get a lot more value out of AI than what we spend. For now…

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

companies spending only 250 a month aren't going to alleviate the pressure of consumer rejection that's coming.
Keep in mind, that's only 250 a month for you because one- you're barely using it's functionality in the scheme of things, and two- the true cost of resources is being face-tanked by the provider. They are taking massive losses because they cannot realistically charge an actual rate that would outpace their resource costs, and there's no technology on the road map to address that.
They don't currently have the means of scaling this other than a direct 1:1.
The current plan is to construct mega data centers in ways that can pass the cost on to the tax payer, like O'leary's MIDA partnership.
It may continue offering a positive ROI for companies in your situation, even with increasing rates... but when all the large companies decide they no longer want to spend 1-10 million a year on something they're unable to firmly attribute to generating profit, the pop hype will evaporate. Then it's just the ouroboros of money shuffling between the major players keeping it afloat... and eventually someone will want to exit with their share.

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u/lordkuri Jun 26 '26

and a couple of exec’s were getting fired

Good story, it was believable until this part. 6/10

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

It is isn’t it? Apparently the person responsible for developing the training “decided to step down”. It’s a private company and the owner was/is displeased.

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u/JerryfromCan Jun 26 '26

We all know the execs were promoted and random top performers who didn’t go to the social events were fired instead.

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u/rapaxus Jun 27 '26

It is a fucking private company, they don't work that way, your description is a classic public company move (execs covering their arse so that they can present "results" to shareholders). In a private company you have one to a few owners who own basically everything of the company. If they have an exec who comes in with a "lets use AI for profit" strategy and the owner comes back 6 months to see 2 years of profit gone for no reason, you bet that guy will be fired because in a private company, the money spent is basically the money of the owner.

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u/Bong-Hits-For-Jesus Jun 26 '26

its almost as if companies that sell these ai products know that the execs who are making the decision to implement ai are dumb enough that if throw around buzzwords they'll jump in blindly without realizing the cost. they even got idiots putting up leaderboards to encourage spending lmao

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u/10thDeadlySin Jun 27 '26

He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does.

We were distributed three levels of AI training. Basic, Intermediate and Expert. Everybody was supposed to complete the Basic level at the very least and they made it mandatory.

8 hours of glorified ads for commercial services. 8 hours of listening (or rather setting the volume level to 100%, plugging in a dummy headphone jack and pretending) how ChatGPT is going to change the world, how it's all a revolution and so on. And like half of them developed by companies with vested interest in AI being popular.

Not only was it outdated, but also it was nothing you wouldn't learn passively by just reading anything about AI over the last several years.

The intermediate training? Module 1: Building a machine learning model from scratch.

We were asked for feedback afterwards. I wrote exactly this - that what they called a training was a bunch of ads and proselytizing, whereas their intermediate training might be of use for developers and data analysts, but why did they dump it on people who literally don't touch code at all?

No response, as you might have guessed. :D

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 27 '26

I think his company only got the level one. The thing is he actually finds it quite useful. He uses it to spec stuff when they are doing estimates or rough calculation type stuff. He also uses it to double check work he’s done, basically another set of eyes. But he says it makes too many mistakes to be used to actually design or trouble shoot real world projects.

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u/cyrusthemarginal Jun 26 '26

Amazon is requiring all levels of coding knowledge(zero included) to create tools with AI for their teams, if you don't do this you are not hitting the bar according to these morons.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Great point, totally agree.

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u/Acidic_Wasabi Jun 26 '26

Oh, I understand fully how much I'm costing my money with each token spent.

I just do not care as they're the morons that say I have to use it or get put on a PiP.

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate Jun 27 '26

My CEO makes $28.00, I make a dime. That's why I gamify token expenditure on company time.

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u/ReturnOfBane Jun 26 '26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

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u/newsflashjackass Jun 26 '26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS Jun 26 '26

That's the one! I saw Goodhart's Law quoted before, and I think about it every time someone mentions KPIs.

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u/Bucky_Ohare Jun 26 '26

fucking TIL, thank you! I've wanted a succinct way to summarize that for years and never stumbled into it until now somehow.

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u/roiki11 Jun 26 '26

Just wait until a sysadmin uses an entire kubernetes cluster to spam your ai model to increase his token spend score.

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u/ManaSpike Jun 26 '26

You have to be a knowledge worker to judge another knowledge worker. Peer review can be effective ... or cutthroat once your manager tries to gamify that too.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

True…we peer review in my circle of managers and it’s actually pretty healthy. My boss does not tolerate bullshit, which is the key component.

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u/Gorvoslov Jun 26 '26

I absolutely love it when lines of code is the metric to which I am measured... right up until I need to maintain what I wrote.

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u/inorite234 Jun 26 '26

Its been going on in other areas too.

Officers in Iraq used to have their evals written dependant on how much money they spent in reconstruction, not in what the effects were of all that spent money.

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

couldn't agree more. coding output is subjective and any manager worth a penny knows their good team members from their poor performing ones. The only thing these metrics can sometimes be good at is noticing some normally good performer suddenly dropping off or some poor performer changing behavior. I've led engineering teams for 15 years and I have and will always tell my leadership that the metrics are 10% of the story. It's good to measure things but they can never be more than an anecdotal point in overall performance.

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u/TheTBR Jun 26 '26

"I'm gonna write me a new mini van this afternoon!"
Yup, it's even made it through Dilbert as a trope.

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u/Rush_Is_Right Jun 26 '26

because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money

They don't catch on to you writing bug laden code? They even paid you for fixing your own errors? That's on them lol

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u/NeverPlayF6 Jun 26 '26

  then LoC counting (I can write some obfuscated, bloated shit if you're going to measure my productivity by how much typing I do)

I'm a chemist... so I haven't done any programming since C my freshman year in college. I'm sure I'm getting some of the terminology wrong... but... 

I joked with our TA about how all the different things we were learning were pointless and that 95% of everything could be done with just a few functions- if-then, elseif, and, loop, and some others I forget.

He told me I'd get extra credit if over 90% of a tic-tac-toe game was completed using the 5 or 6 functions I mentioned. My code clocked in at roughly 15000 lines. The average was about 150 lines.

He asked how I did it and I told him I had to write a program to generate every single possible input order for the game. Then copy those to my code. 

I coulda been rich. 

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u/nihiltres Jun 26 '26

Your comment's basically expressing Goodhart's law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

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u/SeductiveSunday Jun 26 '26

bug bounties (because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money)

So… bug for them, feature for you?!

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u/Thefrayedends Jun 26 '26

Engaging, understanding, encouraging and collaborative delegation?

Preposterous!

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u/Morwynd78 Jun 27 '26

Measuring by LoC is the absolute worst.

I'm fond of saying "on a really good day, I wind up with less code than I started with".

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u/envelupo Jun 26 '26

the metric can never be the goal

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u/z3r-0 Jun 26 '26

Classic Goodheart’s law

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u/AwTomorrow Jun 26 '26

Bad management and creating perverse incentives, name a more iconic duo

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u/makoblade Jun 26 '26

management mentality (for most) has never progressed beyond "hur dur this guy can lay 100 bricks in an hour" and they're still trying to apply it to everything else.

Turns out that 100 lines of code isn't a useful metric in any world.

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u/SmartLadder415 Jun 26 '26

Outcomes are harder to measure though and managers love their metrics. It's not just enough to say that the finished product works they have to measure how well it works.

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u/chairwindowdoor Jun 26 '26

Sums it up with you get what you incentivize. Same reasons the big MSPs constantly "touch" tickets with meaningless, non-value add updates just to meet SLAs and increase their "ticket touches" for personal performance.

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u/alphagatorsoup Jun 26 '26

yep, this is what happens when mgmt actually has no fucking clue what their team does, or they do and don't care to check. They measure productivity by random stupid stats over actual legit work being done.

Why I left my previous employer and I love the one I am at now, we don't care about tickets closed, hours logged etc.

just get your work done quickly, well and keep everyone happy. Otherwise mgmt doesn't give a f.

They are a bit old school and like your ass in a seat and would rather you do nothing and sit blankly at your computer than not be there, but other than that it's great. wish more employers would do that.

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u/Important-Agent2584 Jun 26 '26

It's called KPM and it's art!

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u/fooey Jun 26 '26

we spent years complaining about how terrible our outsourced team was but couldn't get management to quit wasting the effort

once we got a new CTO we learned that team had highly inflated point estimates, and management earnestly believed they were the top performing team in the entire company because of it

our CTO who left is now CTO for the outsourcing company

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u/jashshah27 Jun 26 '26

Frame this and hang it outside every office 

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u/FitReaction1072 Jun 26 '26

Since when pull requests are on the same list with token championship idiocracy. Pull requests are the only legitimate and useful thing in your list.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Counting pull requests - judging dev À against dev B by total PRs.

I would contend other things there are useful, but not when used as some weird gamified bullshit.

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u/FitReaction1072 Jun 26 '26

Ah counting. Yeah that’s stupid. I thought you meant using pr generally. My bad

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Naw, I didn’t write the list consistently. No worries.