this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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As a person who has been managing software development teams for 30+ years, I have an observation.
Invariably, some employees are "average". Not super geniuses, not workaholics, but people who (say) have been doing a good job with customer support. Generally they can code simple things and know the OS versions we support as a power user -- but not as well as a sysadmin.
I do find that if I tell them to use ChatGPT to help debug issues, they do almost as well as if a sysadmin or more experienced programmer had picked up the ticket. It gets better troubleshooting, they maybe fix an actual root cause bug in our product code.
Any time somebody I work with uses AI for debugging they get wrapped around the axle and I have to disabuse them of the nonsense direction they've been led to get to what used to be the starting point.
maybe our averages are different
Maybe. Or maybe you're a disconnected manager that doesn't know what they're talking about. Or maybe you have stock in AI companies. Or maybe you've drunk the coolaid they've been passing out at every all hands meeting.
Who knows ¯_(ツ)_/¯
All I know is I'm tired of everyone saying the lie machine somehow makes people more competent when all I've seen is people get worse at their jobs in the last year.
You dropped one of these: \
It's spare, you can use that one ^
(╯°□°）╯︵ \
I think it can elevate the level of a power user. But not to the level of a sysadmin, unless the user is then picking apart everything the LLM is telling them to do and reading the man pages. At which point, they are pretty much just learning to become a sysadmin.
A smart power user would likely search for some solutions to a problem, get some rough background, then ask an LLM to either explain how a solution solves their problem, or to use their research to validate the response of the LLM.
I don't think an LLM can elevate a normal user to a power user.
Because the user is still going to be copying & pasting commands without understanding them (unless they want to understand them, instead of merely solving the problem in front of them. At which point they are learning to become a poweruser).
I can imagine a general sentiment amongst employees of "support the use of AI or be the first to be layed off".
So even if it lets them close tickets earlier, the tickets might not actually be resolved. Instead of kicking it to someone that actually knows how to fix it, they've just bodged it - and hopefully that bodge doesn't fuck things up down the line.
But the metrics look better, and the employees aren't going to complain.
Looks great to a manager