My workplace is very cautious with AI. It’s very conscious of putting private client data into an AI model that will transfer/use it/spit it out somewhere else, and the legal consequences of making mistakes from AI models making things up.

AI is useful in my work (we use copilot) but it’s limited to the most basic stuff. “Here’s a document, give me three key points of about 20 words each” works pretty well. It’s also ok at rewriting things in a different style but it’s a bit hit and miss.

Its crazy to me that people will use these things as some all-knowing Oracle when they’re mainly just systems that imitate human language or jumped-up search engines. I think it goes to show that things that imitate human communication well can be very convincing, and a herd mentality to adopt new technology out of a fear of being left behind, often amongst people that don’t know anything about the technology.

I find it annoying, because the hype means that if you’re not building a solution that involves AI in some way, you practically can’t get funding. Many vital projects are being cancelled due to a lack of funding and tons of bullshit projects get spun up, where they just slap AI onto a problem for which the current generation of AI is entirely ill-suited.

Basically, if you don’t care for building useful stuff, if you’re an opportunistic scammer, then the hype is fucking excellent. If you do care, then prepare for pain.

We have CoPilot at my corporate job and I use it every day. Summarising email chains, reviewing documents and research. Its a huge time saver.

Its good, not perfect. It makes mistakes and because of hallucination risks i have to double check sources. I dont see it taking my job as its more like having an assistant whose output you have to sense check. Its made me much more productive.

I work in social work; I would say about 60 percent of what I do is paperwork. My agency has told us not to use LLMs, as that would be a massive HIPPA nightmare. That being said, we use “secure” corporate emails. These use Microsoft 365 office suite, which are copilot enabled. These include TLDRs at the top, before you even look at the email, predictive texts… and not much else.

Would I love a bot who could spit out a Plan based on my notes or specifications? absolutely. Do I trust them not to make shit up. Absolutely not.

I am reminded of this article.

The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind.

5/5/2025

Editor’s Note: previous titles for this article have been added here for posterity.

The future of web development is blockchain. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is CSS-inJS. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is Progressive Web Apps. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is Silverlight. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is XHTML. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is Flash. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is ActiveX. Get on or get left behind.

The future of web development is Java applets. Get on or get left behind.

If you aren’t using this technology, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. There is no future where this technology is not dominant and relevant. If you are not using this, you will be unemployable. This technology solves every development problem we have had. I can teach you how with my $5000 course.

I am very, very concerned at how widely it is used by my superiors.

We have an AI committee. When ChatGPT went down, I overheard people freaking out about it. When our paid subscription had a glitch, IT sent out emails very quickly to let them know they were working to resolve it ASAP.

It’s a bit upsetting because may of them are using it to basically automate their job (write reports & emails). I do a lot of work to ensure that our data is accurate from manual data entry by a lot of people… and they just toss it into an LLM to convert it into an email… and they make like 30k more than me.

My company is doing small trial runs and trying to get feedback on if stuff is helpful. They are obviously pushing things because they are hopeful, but most people report that AI is helpful about 45% of the time. I’m sorry your leadership just dove in head first. That’s sound like such a pain.

Everyone in my office hates it, including my director who occasionally ends up going on a rant because Microsoft and Adobe often end up pushing their AI to us when we don’t want it.

Sometimes I’m very thankful I work for a nonprofit. They’re still p shitty to us employees, but our focus is first and foremost on doing the job right, something AI has no chance at.

Our company is forcing us to do everything with AI, hell they developed a “tool” to generate simple apps using AI our customers can use for their enterprise applications and we are forced to generate 2 a week minimum to “experiment” with the constant new features being added by the dev teams behind it (but we’re basically training it).

The director uses AI spy bots to tell him who read and who didn’t read his emails.

Can’t even commit code to our corporate github unless copilot gives it the thumbs up and its constantly nitpicking things like how we wrote our comments and asking to replace pronouns or to write them a different way, which I always reply with “no” because the code is what matters here.

We are told to be positive about AI and to push the use of AI into every facet of our work lives, but I just feel my career as a developer ending because of AI. We’re a bespoke software company and our customers are starting to ask if they should use AI to built their software instead of paying us, which I then have to spend hours explaining them why it would be a disaster due to the shear complexity of what they want to build.

Most if not all executives I talk to are idiots who don’t understand web development, shit some don’t even understand the basics of technology but think they can design an app.

After being a senior dev and writing code for 15 years I’m starting to look at other careers to switch to… Maybe becoming an AI evangelist? I hear companies are desperately looking for them… Lol, what a fucking disaster this shit is becoming.

A higher up really likes AI for simple proofs of concept, but at times they get so big it’s unusable. With the people on my team, however, bad code is synonymous to AI usage or stupidity (same thing)

The head of my agency is a gullible rube who is terrified of being “left behind”, and the head of my department is a grown-up with a family and a career who spends his days off sending AI videos and memes into the work chat.

I’ve been called into meetings and told I have to be positive about AI. I’ve been told to stop coding and generate (very important) things with AI.

It’s disheartening. My career is over, because I have no interest in generating mountains of no-intention code rather than putting in the effort to build reliable, good, useful things for our clients. AI dorks can’t fathom human effort and hard work being important.

I’m working to pay off my debts, and then I’m done. I strongly want to get a job that allows me to be offline.

This is all of tech right now.

I’m in an environment with various level of sensitive data, including very sensitive data. Think GDPR type stuff you really don’t want to accidentally leak.

One day when we started up our company laptops Copilot just was installed and auto launched on startup. Nobody warned us. No indication about how to use it or not use it. That lasted about 3 months. Eventually they limited some ways of using it, gave a little bit of guidance on not putting the most sensitive data in there. Then they enabled Copilot in most apps that we use to actually process the sensitive data. It’s in everything. We are actively encouraged to learn more about it and use it.

I overheard a colleague recently trying to let it create a whole PowerPoint presentation. From what I heard the results were less than ideal.

The scary thing is that I’m in a notoriously risk averse industry. Yet they do this. It’s… a choice.

My boss has mentioned AI once, and it was when I was asking for guidance on how to take over a twice annual presentation he used to run. He said I could just get the LLM to generate the presentation then edit it as needed.

I did not do that. I just made the damn thing myself because, by him saying that, I realized he had no fucking clue how to do any of this so I didn’t have to either.

Corporate has introduced an LLM we’re supposed to be able to use in lieu of asking an HR representative basic questions, like vacation policy and how to get resources for open enrollment. It… barely works. If you happen to use the magic words, it’ll lead you to a PDF of the policy you’re looking for. I just call or email someone in HR. It’s better to build rapport and awareness between home office and the satellite offices, anyway. Makes things smoother when there’s an actual issue to deal with and people help people they like, even just a little, faster.

My boss was curious about it, so she asked me to show her how to use it. She wanted to have it summarize some data from a spreadsheet. It hallucinated with the very first prompt, and she lost all interest in it (win). Later, I disabled everything copilot I can in our tenant and implemented policies to hide/remove it from our PCs. I’ve only had one employee (one of our fire captains) complain about it so far, but I don’t feel bad as his boss was complaining about the AI slop he was turning in on fire reports.

I don’t really see ChatGPT or others popping up in our network traffic either, though I don’t know how/if they are using it on personal phones.

My situation might be different than the average fedi user though… not a very technical group other than me (one guy IT department).