Ask HN: Is your company forcing use of AI?

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Not forced yet, but we have a lower risk appetite than your average firm. If it is used, instructions are clear that the output should not be treated as gospel and verse. Haven't heard of any major issues as a result of unfiltered, unreviewed AI dumps (yet).

The place I work seems to be open to the fact that its not an all seeing, all knowing force in the world. Though we do use it as a quicker search engine.

I've heard of companies that are shoehorning it into everything, I feel this is many companies just playing the game to get better valuations.

Force? No. But an awful lot of trainings, and clients always ask about AI strategy.

Not us, but I know people who are coerced to use AI for programming, where for example KPIs are tied to LLM usage.

Is this similar to companies forcing TDD or extreme programming or pair programming on their employees? Some manager hoping to get more productivity by imposing a tool or technique?

nah mate. the talk of ai usage has dwindled down but from time to time, i see people use it.

No, but I wish it did for stuff like summarizing meetings, etc.

Everybody focuses on programming, but the real value in is project management imho.

Not forced. Encouraged. Everyone used it earlier without revealing it, now it is open. Knowing how and when to use your tools properly is a good idea.

No, and most seems to avoid using AIs for pretty much anything. The usage I've seen has been mostly inspirational.

We are allowed to use AI for coding, with the understanding that we are responsible for the code generated by the AI, not legally obviously, but functionally.

We recently got Claude Code and there is a very strong push to use it.

I recently did for the first time. Spent 15 minutes writing a long prompt to implement a ticket. A repeated pattern of code, 5 classes + config per topic that deeply interact with each other and it did the job perfectly.

It convinced me that the current code monkey jobs, which are >90%, >95%? of software engineering jobs, will disappear within 10 years.

We‘ll only need senior/staff/architect level code reviewers and prompt engineers.

When the last generation that manually wrote code dies out, all people will do is prompting.

Just like assembler became a niche, just like C became a niche, high level languages will become a niche.

If you still don‘t believe, you haven‘t tried the advanced tools that can modify a whole project, are too incompetent to properly prompt or indeed work in one of the rare, arcane frontier- state-of-the-art niches where AI can‘t help.

Not forced, at least of yet. The executive wing won't stop talking about it though. I imagine I'm gonna start getting the stink eye at some point since I don't use it.

Forced, no. The consulting company that employs me is talking about AI constantly and our internal viva engage is full och people talking about it. None of them are programmers.

The client I work at, through them, has made some tools available but no-one is using them for anything.

It's considered a minimum skill requirement to know how and when to use AI and to actually then use it, yes. I haven't seen managers enforce it but the CEO already said so. In practice there are still people who are resistant of course.

Our company is positioned right at the edge of the wave for this though so it's understandable.

I work at a small web company (.net based, Netherlands) and we're just experimenting with it. We have a paid copilot subscription, but nothing about it is mandatory in any way. But this place is conservative in the sense that self hosting is the norm and cloud services like Azure or even github (we self host Gitea) are not, other than MS 365 for Teams and e-mail.

It would also be interesting to know how using AI is encouraged.

What are best practices? What tools are genuinely helpful, such as automatic reviews in a build street, or sentiment analysis in commit messages?

We're among the companies that decided to be "AI-first" - whatever that means. They are spending huge amount of money and effort to deploy AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, etc.

I'm kinda worried about how the massive usage of AI coding tool will affect the understanding of large codebases and complex systems, but to be totally honest I'm really impressed by Claude Code and how it can write Terraform/Helm/Ruby based on the company's idioms (and I'm talking about a repository with 250k+ lines of HCL!).

The following is a year 2,065 Bed Time Story featuring a childhood lesson of being adaptable: "Near the end of the 2020s those who rejected AI out of misunderstanding were left behind; those who embraced it grew wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile, the anti-adopters lived miserably, consumed by resentment, blaming everyone and everything for their plight except themselves and their own failure to adapt."

Yes, and it's tracked, so I've started shifting personal AI use to company-provide accounts to "get credit" for using AI more.

Yes, and we even hired a guy to do it. He's a young fellow who has been using every AI tool under the sun, seemingly forever. Also well connected in the space. He comes up with various suggestions about how to use all the tools.

I'm certainly seeing the benefits. A lot of tasks are faster with AI. Even some quite fiddly bits of log-diving and finding subtle bugs can be done by AI, which would have taken me considerably longer.

I'm still finding that overall architecture needs to be done by me, though. Once you make the task big enough, AI goes off the rails and makes some really odd stuff.

The company where i work is actually halting all AI Projects for next couple of months due to huge cost involved, however copilot stays. Fintech

No one’s being forced, but we’re encouraged to explore and experiment with AI tools. And not just for writing code. It's a quite firm belief in the company as a whole that the winners in the 'AI age' will be the companies that are able to utilize AI tools improve their internal workflows and become more productive. So we get to try out lots of different things, and we make sure to share our learnings with each other.

Using Gemini Pro. No, I adopted it all on my own, but work pays. I love it, even though I can't use it on everything. Most developers here are using it, with approval on a per-projext basis.

Lately it's taken over code reviews, for myself and when I review other people's code. Extremely helpful. It's made software development fun again.

It's really interesting to see the extreme contrast between the constant praise of AI coding tools here on HN vs the actual real world performance as seen recently on public Microsoft repos, where it utterly fails at even the most basic tasks.