AI agents lag far behind human workers. Why are tech companies laying off the humans? (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 1 day ago by ValueSubtracted@startrek.website to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 44 points 1 day ago

Because it never mattered if the technology worked or not, it was about dehumanizing workers.

[-] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 day ago

Why are tech companies laying off the humans?

Because they think they can reduce costs / increase profits by doing it.

[-] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 day ago

Because if you say you're doing layoffs because you're doing poorly or want to bribe shareholders it's bad, but if you say you're being innovative you're worthy of investment.

[-] ignirtoq@feddit.online 19 points 1 day ago

It's cover. They're not laying off because of AI. They're laying off to make line go up.

[-] rozodru@piefed.world 10 points 1 day ago

bingo. I live in Toronto and i'm a contractor that is doing code reviews with a focus on LLMs for startups and other small tech firms. I'd say 9 out of 10 times my reports can be summed up as "this could have all been avoided if a team of devs had remained on staff" and then I fix it.

They'll keep trucking along with AI and then hiring people like me for a premium because in the long run it's still cheaper than having a team of 5+ devs on staff and that line will go up. the AI isn't improving anything, it's hindering them but it's still slightly cheaper than having humans on board. broken and delayed product be damned, their still saving a couple nickels.

[-] lobut@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago

hey! I'm in Markham ... our company is trying to be AI first. We're having it set up a brand new project from scratch.

Instead of letting the devs talk about it and then using AI to build the code. They funnel the batch of tickets straight into the AI machine and we have to review the code afterwards.

It takes so long to review the code. Most devs don't like reading lots of Markdown files to get the assumptions onto a big project.

The guys pushing this seem to just negate the fact that we need to spot-check things and follows and things make sense.

They took all our PR feedback and just fed it back into AI and we have to do another gigantic PR review. It feels a bit silly.

[-] nik282000@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

Have you met middle management? I'd take an LLM running on a Core 2 Duo over the decision making skills of someone who thinks an A3 sheet of paper can solve every problem.

LLMs can not replace actual productive humans but I will not shed a single tear if they wipe out the e-mail spamming, bean counting, micro-managing twits, who desperately want "AI" to improve their "workforce."

[-] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You're reducing payroll, which is the biggest expense for most companies. That will make line go up for a while, until the lowered productivity catches up with you. With a little bit of luck, someone else will get blamed for that.