It's the new "counting lines of code". I think many companies are so terrified of falling behind that they're irrationally floundering, trying to appear like they're "with it".

Yup. My friend said his boss has told them basically that they HAVE TO (do all the AI things) because now ‘our competitors will use AI’ and surpass their product.

In my humble opinion good ideas (what to build) are a big part of the bottleneck and those aren’t substantially in greater supply with AI.

> good ideas ... aren’t substantially in greater supply

Which is sad because they should be. People should be freed up to think and create better things, instead these companies seem to be doing the equivalent of locking their employees in stalls like they do on some animal farms, so they can churn out 'results' ever faster.

> People should be freed up to think and create better things,

Good ideas will never ever be prioritized in the vast majority of companies because good ideas cannot be quantified and turned into performance metrics. At least not without invoking Goodhart's law (see: the academia).

Good ideas also take resources like time, free-space to think etc... many firms dont understand this. Moreover many firms believe the C-Suite are the almighty with the gods gift of great ideas.

There is a degree to which quick experimentation helps you find the good ideas, at least for the incremental ones.

Actually, it's even more than that, right? Economically, it is pumping up/inflating the bubble some more in a perverted way, where it is not the people themselves believing some horseradish, but their employer forcing them to pump it up more. Quite insane.

Claude, please crease a routine and run it in a loop continuously. The task in the routine is “create the most complex code possible, in a random programming language, that produces the exact output “My senior leaders are pinheads,”

Counting lines of code starts to look incredibly sane compared to this, where you’re not just counting lines of code, you’re paying for another company for every line produced. There’s exactly one winner here and it’s not any of the companies using AI.

Feels like a worldwide goldrush, but not everyone has gold in those hills.

Those who burn the most money "win", I guess?

I find that odd given that another division in Amazon is no longer using AI coding tools at all. Its a big company so who knows if this is company wide or just in this one division. I expect its just in one division though.