In most cases, LLMs will not replace humans or reduce...

In most cases, LLMs will not replace humans or reduce labor costs as companies hope. They will •increase• labor costs, in the form of tedious clean-up and rebuilding customer trust.

After a brief sugar high in which LLMs rapidly and easily create messes that look like successes, a whole lot of orgs are going to find themselves climbing out of deep holes of their own digging.

Example from @Joshsharp:
https://aus.social/@Joshsharp/112646263257692603

Like 13 August at 16:09 | Open on hachyderm.io

3 comments

Paul Cantrell

Those who’ve worked in software will immediate recognize the phenomenon of “messes that look like successes.”

One of my old Paulisms is that the real purpose of a whole lot of software processes is to make large-scale failure look like a string of small successes.

13 August at 16:13 | Open on hachyderm.io

Paul Cantrell

The crisp “even an executive can understand it” version of the OP is:

⚠️ AI increases labor costs ⚠️

(“Why?” “Because it’s labor-intensive to clean up its messes.”)

13 August at 18:59 | Open on hachyderm.io

Paul Cantrell

I said “the purpose of a whole lot of software processes is to make large-scale failure look like a string of small successes.”

Huh? What does that look like??

It looks like this:

✅ Meetings held
✅ Plan signed off
✅ Tests passed
✅ Iterations iterated
✅ Velocity increased
✅ Thing implemented
✅ Checkpoints checked
✅ Thing released
✅ Blinkenlights blink
✅ Line goes up
✅ Thing updated
❌ Software never •really• solves the problem it was supposed to solve in the first place, creates more problems

13 August at 20:14 | Open on hachyderm.io