Not even slightly. Any engineering business going all in on AI is heading down the shitter fast so it’s a useful canary for the competent people on the payroll.
I’m lucky to be in a sector that’s generally too well regulated for slop to filter through, but we’re already seeing fixer upper jobs come in from firms who picked a cheap contract from some AI-first start up and now needs someone to make their new equipment actually work and up to code.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
That’s a generous estimate. When these jobs were a matter of correcting incompetent or lazy human work, you could depend on the problem being a lack of it - lack of compliant methods, lack of error handling, lack of required documentation.
With AI, the volume of work we’d need to comb through has exploded.
There’ll be three different subroutines handling the same error, each tripping up the others using it’s own subtly wrong method, and all of it couched in thousands of lines of code handling errors that could not possibly happen.
There’ll be fifty instances referencing an ISO standard and if the standard does exist it’ll have the index wrong or just invent a plausible sounding line to support whatever method was used. Once any error like this is found, ALL of it needs to be verified.
Turning someone’s slop job into something I can sign off on is several times more work than just starting over, for a worse end result. If a client can’t be made to see thats I usually advise to not take the contract.
Not even slightly. Any engineering business going all in on AI is heading down the shitter fast so it’s a useful canary for the competent people on the payroll.
I’m lucky to be in a sector that’s generally too well regulated for slop to filter through, but we’re already seeing fixer upper jobs come in from firms who picked a cheap contract from some AI-first start up and now needs someone to make their new equipment actually work and up to code.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
That’s a generous estimate. When these jobs were a matter of correcting incompetent or lazy human work, you could depend on the problem being a lack of it - lack of compliant methods, lack of error handling, lack of required documentation.
With AI, the volume of work we’d need to comb through has exploded. There’ll be three different subroutines handling the same error, each tripping up the others using it’s own subtly wrong method, and all of it couched in thousands of lines of code handling errors that could not possibly happen.
There’ll be fifty instances referencing an ISO standard and if the standard does exist it’ll have the index wrong or just invent a plausible sounding line to support whatever method was used. Once any error like this is found, ALL of it needs to be verified.
Turning someone’s slop job into something I can sign off on is several times more work than just starting over, for a worse end result. If a client can’t be made to see thats I usually advise to not take the contract.