1. Skepticism about AI ROI and hype
Many commenters doubt that AI is delivering measurable returns yet, comparing it to past tech bubbles and noting the long timelines for payoff.
- “The ROÍ will be happening any day now, we promise. Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts.” – mjhay
- “Do I understand correctly that means there is no AI ROI to show off yet? If correct that’s pretty bad, no?” – dgellow
- “For the internet in many cases it took a decade or longer too, no?” – Kassam_L (referencing the productivity paradox)
2. AI’s impact on software development
Opinions split on whether LLMs aid coding or create new technical debt; they speed up tasks like test generation and refactoring but can encourage quick‑fix rewrites that leave messy codebases.
- “LLMs are pretty good at helping with that though…. You can also ask them to write a bunch of tests and then rip out the old implementation and fix it with a new one.” – jeffreyrogers
- “Yeah, unreasonable deadlines… spent trying to untangle a mass of overly verbose spaghetti code… No, thank you. I’ll leave the underpaid disinfestation job to someone else.” – sph
- “These days ppl often… simply ask an LLM to replace something rather than debugging it… So rather than debug a steaming pile of code you might be able to treat it as a greenfield opportunity.” – gumby
3. Consulting/enterprise IT dynamics
A recurring theme is the reliance on high‑priced consultants (e.g., McKinsey) to “fix” IT messes, often seen as a costly band‑aid for deeper organizational issues.
- “You have to recognize that a vast majority of enterprises fall in the category of 'Dumb IT'… they look up to the likes of McKinsey for wisdom.” – bwfan123
- “Being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into…” – PaulRobinson
- “It's going to be a horrible job though, the equivalent of fixing Y2K bugs in Cobol code except with code bases that even more vast and unintelligible.” – rwmj