Ask HN: How do you deal with AI output of your boss? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with AI output of your boss?

22 pointsokr18 comments

So, my boss goes on a rampage. You can clearly see the joy and at the same time the rage and impatience. AI is the tool he always wanted. We are too slow. Process is out of the window. No need for sprints anymore. No planning, just doing. All people downstream must somehow adapt.

Whenever i see now his automated messages in slack, my natural reaction is: why do i even bother reading that? Thats for machines to read. He does not need me? Clearly i am not made for that. What is he expecting me to do? To confirm how great the AI did the job? Should i remember all these perfect presentations AI has created and integrate it into my doings into the coming weeks?

I am torn. Should i really free my AI and deal with all this incoming text? Is this the way to react on this perfection?

I am not mad at him, it clearly frees him of all the burder of dealing with people.

I just dont know how to deal with this output personally. It is not for humans.

I feel left alone. This is not a company anymore. Everyone is talking to AI now. This feels like chaos. Where everyone can do everything and stepping into each other's domain and it is perfect. The only way AI is stopped at are the ACLs.

And because AI does everything for me, i don't remember things anymore, as i have no emotion connected with it. Feels like bad schooling and memoizing and get through it and you can't as it so dry and lifeless.

So, how people deal with it in a company context? How have they setup their machines to react and still be up to date without reading the constant stream of changes coming from others?

Reply with AI as well. And make it obvious. Then ask AI for a very brief and concise summary of your communications at the end of every day.

This is bad, but you have to deal with it one way or another that will keep you sane. And you can always communicate with the rest of your colleagues to not feel alone.

For him, it's a new fun toy to play with, and he also thinks that makes him very AI-forward or AI-native or whatever the current corporate jargon is.

He is doing this because he thinks this will net him another promotion, and that's the way forward because big shot CEO are doing. That's how most corporate managers think. It seems they know what they are doing, but they mostly try to blend in as much as possible and be the most "forward-thinking" and "raising the bar" and "leading by example".

First rule is - if you don't write it, don't expect me to read it. If you AI-write something, then let me get an AI to read it too.

The only solution I can think of is to get AI implemented upstream in the planning phases so that it results in specs for spec-driven development. Your boss will be able to directly contribute without bothering anyone, but he will also think developers are obsolete. You need to warn him about the dangers of vibe-coded shit, but either way there's no positive scenario these days.

I practiced this a long time ago when the food if email became too much. I just don't read most of it. If it's important, someone will speak to me about it. This has worked for me ~10 years (I do skim my email, but not often).

Find the minimal number of critical things you feel you should be working on, and work on them. Use what resources are practical to use and ignore the rest. I've got a relatively complex problem to figure out over the next week or two, and one of the developers has been asking Claude and posting much of the output to Confluence pages, but even he says it's too much information to process and, as a result of a few things we've learned along the way so far, much of the AI summarized information is now out of date.

I just try to concentrate on doing a good job with the information I am able to process.

I think this is the best method for solving such problems

When my boss sent me a 10 page email of AI ideas on how to complete our upcoming project, I asked him for his prompt. The prompt is what he really cares about and what I needed to know to make sure the projects meets his expectations. The prompt was 2-3 sentences.

I've had this same experience with a client, except they refuse to send me any prompts at all. I'm forced to take the slop and do something with it even though it's contradictory and in many cases counterproductive. Unfortunately this strange behavior is causing many of this person's stakeholders and collaborators to just outright disregard his demands and form a curious 'shadow organization' just to get day-to-day work done. The client is frustrated that nobody is listening to him but it's not really him speaking, is it?

Wow! I am in the exact same situation with my boss, who's also the CEO. Unfortunately, we are a startup of 4 people, and I am the only technical guy, but with AI, my boss thinks he can pretty much write the software himself now, even though he keeps saying all his work is "jumping off point". He continues to merge code into the deployment branch. I am honestly just nodding along and don't care much about where the product is heading at this point since the decision to write the code was already made by my boss.

If you have a "CEO" in a 4 people company, AI doesn't seem to be your only problem :)

Well, a lot of startups < 10 people have a CEO now. That's really not the concern being discussed here :-).

I think unfortunately this is a stage people have to go through when they're first exposed to AI. You just have to let it play out for them to realize actually they still need to cooperate with humans to get anything meaningful done.

I have a client that has started "helping". I told him that under no circumstances should he push code into staging, which I almost regret, because I get to read Claude messages in Teams asking me to merge stuff. I just do the task, and don't engage with the AI bot in chat.

I feed it back to AI to respond with em-dashes, en-dashes and clearly Claude-like writing.

Just ignore it and they'll get bored and move on to the next thing

It's been 11 months now, though.

you should take the information the same way whether it was produced by him manually or with the help of AI. If you won't someone else who needs a job more will.

I don't have any advice, but I sure do feel bad for you!

Have you talked to him about it?

And what do your colleagues feel?

in a similar vain, how do you stop your boss and business partners producing tons of AI slop?! lol! I'm forever explain that AI is a tool. Owning a skill-saw doesnt mean you know how to use it lol!!

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