A veteran programmer shared his brutally honest opinions about AI’s role in the workplace, and it’s as much an indictment of the tech as it is of the organizations lazily deploying it.
In an X rant that’s being praised in online programming circles, the programmer, Dax Raad, said that what’s holding back software companies isn’t the speed they’re able to churn out code, but the quality of their ideas — an issue AI isn’t going to solve, despite the industry’s fixation on emphasizing its supposed ability to supercharge productivity.
“Your org rarely has good ideas. Ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping,” wrote Raad, whose own company OpenAuth sells AI tools.
And workers aren’t using AI to be ten times more effective, he continued; instead, “they’re using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend.”
Worse yet, the “two people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon.”
“Even when you produce work faster you’re still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real,” Raad concluded.
There’s some research that backs up Raad’s scathing assessment. An ongoing study reported in Harvard Business Review which monitored two hundred employees at a US tech company found that AI was actually intensifying the workers’ jobs, instead of reducing their workloads. Using AI to accelerate tasks, it turned out, was a double-edged sword, because it led to “workload creep,” forming a vicious cycle in which AI raised expectations for how fast the workers had to churn stuff out, which in turn made them more reliant on AI to keep up with the greater demands. The upshot: worker fatigue, burnout, and lower quality work; not the hallmarks of a thriving organization.
Another study documented how AI led to employees passing off low quality “workslop” that masqueraded as good work but in reality required someone else downstream to fix it. On top of slowing everything down, it bred resentment among coworkers, with some admitting that receiving workslop from a colleague lowered their opinion of them.
As Raad makes clear, AI is not a cure-all. And even if AI does increase productivity, that productivity can be a mirage. How often are AI models producing shoddy code? And what if that shoddy code goes unnoticed? Maybe, as Raad suggests, ideas being “expensive to implement” was a good thing, because it forced engineers to think about a problem creatively. Not every impulse should be entertained. What’s a thousand ideas that were dashed off with an AI instead of a few promising ones that are honed and given time and attention? The former may seem more productive, when it’s really a collection of dead ends.
Moreover, having employees become dependent on AI hardly seems conducive to rewarding and fostering creativity. As numerous experts have warned, it’s another form of cognitive offloading, in which crucial functions of our brain, including critical thinking, are outsourced to a piece of technology.
This isn’t the line being peddled by tech companies, however. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly told his workers they’d be “insane” not to use AI to complete every possible task. Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman claims AI’s already so effective that virtually all white collar tasks will be automated within a year and a half. And Microsoft and Google both brag that over a quarter of their code is now AI-generated.
But however useful these AI tools may or may not be, they can’t work miracles. At the end of the day, it comes down to humans to run a tight ship.
“Even when you produce work faster” with AI, Raad said, “you’re still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real.”
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