I'm being heavily consulted to advise management on culture change towards AI. And my number one message is this: make the number one, first and potentially only beneficiary of AI use the individual staff members themselves. If they have more time now, DO NOT start filling that with more work for them to do. If they do more all by themselves accept it as a bonus (experience says this is overwhelming what will happen anyway). Whichever way it goes, let them experience directly the benefit, and let the culture change happen organically downstream from that.

I think all these companies front-loading staff reductions are actively sabotaging themselves in the worst possible way in this regard.

This.

I’m in a dreadful situation right now. Everyone in team got a claude account, but I’m a contractor so not for me (the only dev in team of 25 consultants). Someone in the team assigned me a task to review claude skill that opens up tickets for me. I’m not even using claude and official policy is no AI use for development…

Otherwise it’s been mixed bag. Pace definitely picked up and things that I actually enjoyed doing (UI) it does very well. Things that are actually hard (backend logic) it sucks and painted me in corner too many times.

> using AI to monitor how everyone uses their computers

It's the other way around -- they're monitoring the computers to train AI.

If they were competently evil they would have just done it quietly.

I work by myself an feel great joy. Today I talked to the AI about a feature I want to add to this week's project (https://www.writelucid.cc) and it had some good feedback. Later I refactored a big part of the code to simplify it (though I had to explain to Claude why this was possible), and it came out great.

I've never been happier, I can now build everything I've been wanting to build, really fast, with very few bugs.

I work for myself and I absolutely love AI.

I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately.

My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever.

Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click.

This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your customer.

Writing in super typesafe languages with the highest level of strictness helps a lot. My AI stack is Rust and Typescript.

I've generally assumed that AI would make developers get lower compensation because of the lowered quantity of developers required for the same output, but this raises the possibility of it actually increasing if more developers end up doing their own things instead of entering the broader labor market :)