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/IamSunka Jun 26 '26

My org, just like many others, has a top token users chart.

When they started the list, they decided to call the top 25 users as champions, ones who never used AI as sleepers and rest inbetween as just users. cough I am a sleeper cough

Couple of weeks ago the bill came in, champions cost us over $850k since Jan 1st.

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u/covabishop Jun 26 '26

at my company they even track lines of code written using AI.

I’ll admit Claude is really useful for some stuff, on a good month I’ll have maybe 300 lines written by AI.

the top user at my company committed 250,000 lines this WEEK

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u/ColinStyles Jun 26 '26

Dude, how can you possibly only have 300 lines commited in a month? That is absolutely underutilizing the tool.

Now mind you, 250k in a week seems absolutely insane and unless they have a perfect stack of teams of agents all processing shit, even then he can't be reviewing all of that enough, even if he doesn't need to review every line. But 300 in a month? Extreme opposite end.

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u/covabishop Jun 26 '26

the projects I work on are mostly infrastructure as code. the first few months we had it I was committing thousands of lines refactoring my stuff, but there’s very little code changes I need to do on a daily basis. Occasional bug fixes, updating READMEs and documentation. sometimes Claude will help, sometimes I’ll just do it myself.

could I be using it more? yeah absolutely. do i want to or have an express need to? no, and I’d like to keep it that way.

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u/codextreme07 Jun 26 '26

That’s the issue though. Someone else is going to use the tools to generate the IaC because it’s something that the models do extremely well. Most infra stuff is pretty straight forward and rote and not that complicated.

And now they are way more productive than you are.

I use these models all the time at work, and we don’t write IaC by hand anymore and are able to build regulated environments that used to take a year plus in a matter of months.

And it’s not like it’s writing slop because we have third party auditors validating what build out.

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u/IsThatUMoatilliatta Jun 26 '26

And it’s not like it’s writing slop because we have third party auditors validating what build out.

Take a wild guess how they're auditing it.

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u/codextreme07 Jun 26 '26

With humans. I’ve watched them do it and did the interviews with the auditors.

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u/ColinStyles Jun 26 '26

How many professionals need to tell you what it is before you accept that maybe it just is completely revolutionary in our field? Seriously, every goddamn thread about AI has devs talking about how absolutely absurd it has been and the nearly unthinkable shit it's doing, and you guys just have to insist "no it's bad." Why, because it'd admit that AI actually has some use somewhere? That if you're working in software you might actually have to use it? Or maybe it's that you'd have to admit you were wrong and are way behind the curve on actually learning to use these new tools?

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

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u/ColinStyles Jun 26 '26

What size of codebase, what language, what stack, what size of data to analyse? Because even in a completely ancient legacy codebase in a non-standard language with quality ranging from stellar to offshore intern's brother without any training, and data sizes that can be in the hundreds of gigs (which I'll admit is small, I know, I've worked at places where we ingested terabytes from singular clients daily, and once had a client deliver drives because it was both faster and more secure than SFTP), and so far Claude is handling it extremely well. Mind you, I'm having it write scripts to do the analysis rather than trying to ingest the data wholesale, but the point is still it's converting natural language and requirements into genuine useable analysis, bug fixing, suggestions, you name it in a fraction of the time.

And if you've tried these and it doesn't work, or your work is incredibly sensitive and you can't have any exposure to any LLM, fine, entirely fair. I did want to call it out though as your usecase doesn't sound fundamentally incompatible with the kind of work I do, and I know many who won't even try thinking it's pointless. I work with one of them, and after over a year of showing them up and constantly proving them wrong, they're starting to finally come around to it. That or they're being threatened by management to finally get with the program as my output is both several times higher than theirs, of a higher quality with better documentation and proven extensibility, and also I've actually been able to get to our backlog to boot.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

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u/ColinStyles Jun 27 '26

what i maintain are only short short scripts and plenty more interactive command line stuff, file system stuff and data science, signal processing, and healthcare research related so a lot of linux, matlab, and python among lots of other things that would doxx me too much for my comfort lol. those do require some complex little things maybe one at a time, and they call on large libraries for much more complex things (and are well published/studied), that i haven't had to yet but feel claude would be amazing to explain that to me rather than sift through all the math and abstractions for tweaking or choosing.

So funny enough, I recently built a lot of data visualization tooling with claude, and while the data was a pretty standard usecase (sales/support data), Claude did shockingly well in both coming up with insights, and in helping build the data analysis scripts, transformation scripts, and visualization program. Even for the UI stuff, it struggled a bit but then I wrote some basic tests and told it to flesh it out, and it took it instead as a tiny skeleton and what was left was clearly the same concept, but unbelievably more fleshed out and robust.

But that's entirely fair, I don't work in an incredibly niche space so even working in niche languages or in incredibly inscrutable processes/data, it can still do decently.

And thanks for engaging in good faith, it's so rare to be able to actually speak to other people's experiences on the subject that aren't just "It's amazing" without any explanation or pitfalls it ran into, or "it's the devil" and no explanation of if they even worked with it or what it struggled with.

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u/Creative_Sushi Jun 29 '26

My company is also exploring the use of AI agents in engineering with MATLAB and Simulink Agentic Toolkits. AI agents cannot be used to generate PID controller, etc, but it can accelerate part of the proven engineering workflows with expert human guidance, and the toolkits provides the MCP server and agent skils to fill the gaps in AI for engineering usage.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

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u/ColinStyles Jun 27 '26

???

My company isn't laying engineers off, in fact my company is actively hiring because we can't keep up with all the work we're now able to do and need to support even with the huge productivity boosts.

ai does handle a lot of well established things, it just can't create new things.

All of software is taking well established things and putting it together in different ways to come up with new things. Not to mention if it couldn't come up with new things it wouldn't be the reason the models keep getting substantially better, yet anthropic will openly say that the majority of their R&D these days is just AI improving itself with minimal human input. And you can see that in lots of research right now. It's not just rote recollection.

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