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Ask HN: Are LLMs slowly making companies dysfunctional?

1 points by haute_cuisine ↗ HN
LLMs are great. They can quickly one-shot plausible solutions for many problems. This makes companies push hard to offload rising cognitive demands to LLMs.

It doesn't make much sense to invest effort into verifying a plausible-looking throwaway solution that is reviewed and smoke-tested by an LLM, with a quick glance from a tired human.

This results in complexity creep everywhere: decisions, communication, code, documentation, etc.

On par with cognitive debt, as thinking and decision refinement were offloaded, nobody gained unique experience solving a niche use case. This is equal to having a knowledgeable person leave the company before the knowledge transfer occurred. All you're left with is a legacy of someone else's assumptions and decisions you'll never be fully aware of.

I already see it happening. In support, LLMs never solved any of my support requests. Support, which should know the product inside out, recommends visiting pages and clicking buttons that are hallucinated and don't exist in the product. In code, codebases are ballooning with unreasonable complexity. In product, interface decisions are outsourced to LLMs, making companies arrive at the same solution for their unique niche problems.

Are you observing something similar?

7 comments

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toomuchtodo
Yes. I'm getting chat responses from mid workers that are clearly LLM responses. When I hop on a call and say "Please explain this to me live" I get deer in headlights. Sometimes they get fired for this, sometimes they don't. The code reviews I can deal with, that's what the tools are for and it is the person shipping who ends up owning the pain, but dealing with folks who are simply shipping slop ideas in the chat when you're trying to perform knowledge work is a level of hell I was unfamiliar with.
verdverm
I suspect it is uncovering existing dysfunction like nothing has before. Ai is a mirror and separates wheat from chaff too.
nectomax
Not in my opinion. This technology will be like the advent of electricity. Adaptation is not optional if you want to survive. I don't think AI is going to put everyone out of work - at least not in my lifetime - it just makes us better!
lerp-io
ai gonna get orders of magnitude more Op so just stop coping go outside and touch grass
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