Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.
Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines. The latter is wildly more productive than the former. If you owned a business that employed a bunch of cobblers, then moving them all out of their little shops into one big factory where they can produce 100x as many shoes means you just got yourself 100x richer.
But for an individual cobbler, you basically got fired at one job and hired at another. This may come as a surprise to those who view work as simply an abstract concept that produces value units, but people actually have preferences about how they spend their time. If you're a cobbler, you might enjoy your little workshop, slicing off the edge of leather around the heel, hammering in the pegs, sitting at your workbench.
The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.
You might not want to quit that job and get a different job running a shoe assembly line in a factory. Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer. But the boss isn't saying that. He's saying "all of the cobblers at the other companies are doing this to, so where are you gonna go?".
Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.
Yup. It’s what I’ve come to realize. My job is probably safe, as long as I will be willing to adapt. I have still not even tried AI once, and don’t care for it, but I know at one point I probably will have to.
I don’t actually think it’ll be a productivity boost the way I work. Code has never been the difficult part, but I’ll definitely have to show I have included AI in my workflow to be left alone.
Oh well…
Remember when companies all forced us to buy smartphones? Or switch to search engines instead of books? Or when Amazon announced it was "react native first"?
Goes to show how infested with disconnected management this industry is.
All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".
20 years ago or so, we had an exec ask us about our unit tests.
On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.
AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker. Converting an entire factory is a top-down decision. No single worker can individually decide to start using electricity instead of steam power, but individuals can choose whether/how to use AI or any other individual-level tool.
Productive output is a lagging indicator. Using AI tools is theoretically leading???
People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.
That’s simply not true. Developers hand-writing assembly readily adopted compilers, accountants readily adopted spreadsheets, and farmers readily adopted tractors and powered mills.
That's false. Those things were in fact resisted in some cases. For instance, look up the swing riots of the 1830s.
There might be a temporary resistance from violence but eventually competition will take over. The issue in this case is that we're not looking at voluntary adoption due to a competitive advantage - we're seeing adoption by fiat.
AI is a broad category of tools, some of which are highly useful to some people - but mandating wide adoption is going to waste a lot of people's time on inefficient tools.
The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by landowners and tenant farmers, often directly against the wishes of the laborers.
A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity. Why would employees enthusiastically respond to a mandate that will provide them with no benefit?
Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.
I'm sorry to say this, but the company does not need employees to respond enthusiastically. They'll just replace the people who resist for too long. Employees who resist indefinitely have absolutely zero leverage unless they're working on a small subset of services or technologies where AI coding agents will never be useful (which rules out the vast majority of employed software developers).
Your examples are productivity boosters that don't threaten job security. A human has to provide inputs to the compiler, the spreadsheet, and the tractor.
It's so sad to see some of these companies completely fail their AI-first communication [1], when they would just get so much from "We think AI can transform the way we work. We're giving you access to all these tools, please tell us what works and what doesn't". And that would be it.
[1] there was a remote universe where I could see myself working for Shopify, now that company is sitting somewhere between Wipro and Accenture in my ranking.
Unfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".
If performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too!
It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.
It's not inevitable, it's just poor leadership. I've seen changes at large organizations take without being crudely pushed top-down and you'd better believe I've seen top-down initiatives fail, so "performance management" is neither necessary nor sufficient.
If everyone is ignoring it, it can't be that great. If it's that great, people will adopt it organically based on how it's useful for them.
The executives pushing AI use everywhere aren’t basing it on actual performance (which is an orthogonal concept). It’s just the latest shiny bauble.
Performance management isn't rating how people are doing. It's transforming the resources of the company into something that you want it to do. If they want to transform the current state of the company into something that has AI use as a core capability, that is performance management.
There are good books on this: e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Next-Generation-Performance-Management...
I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing.
A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. There were 9700 created in a month or so. Imagine the amount of tech debt, security holes, and business logic mistakes this orgy of agents will cause and will have to be fixed in the future.
edit: typo
This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying.
People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc.
It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends.
I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. The closest was the early 00s offshoring boom before it peaked and was rationalized/rolled back to some degree. The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.
> I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working.
> The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.
I concur 100%. This is a monkey-see-monkey-do FOMO mania, and it's driven by the C-suite, not rank-and-file. I've never seen anything like it.
Other sticky "productivity movements" - or, if you're less generous like me, fads - at the level of the individual and the team, for example agile development methodologies or object oriented programming or test driven development, have generally been invented and promoted by the rank and file or by middle management. They may or may not have had some level of industry astroturfing to them (see: agile), but to me the crucial difference is that they were mostly pushed by a vanguard of practitioners who were at most one level removed from the coal face.
Now, this is not to say there aren't developers and non-developer workers out there using this stuff with great effectiveness and singing its praises. That _is_ happening. But they're not at the leading edge of it mandating company-wide adoption.
What we are seeing now is, to a first approximation, the result of herd behavior at the C-level. It should be incredibly concerning to all of us that such a small group of lemming-like people should have such an enormously outsized role in both allocating capital and running our lives.
I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?
It is investor sentiment and FOMO. If your investors feel like AI is the answer you will need to start using AI.
I am not as negative on AI as the rest of the group here though. I think AI first companies will out pace companies that never start to learn the AI muscle. From my prospective these memos mostly seem reasonable.
You might be misreading negative sentiment towards poor leadership as negative sentiment towards AI.
If AI is the answer, then there's no reason for a top-down mandate like this. People will just start using as they see fit because it helps them do their jobs better, instead of it being forced on them, which doesn't sound much like AI is the answer investors thought it was.
I have wondered the exact same thing. It's uncanny how in-sync they all are. I can only suppose that the trend trickles down from the same few influential sources.
> Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere
I mean.. recent FBI files of certain emails would imply.. probably, yes.
> FOMOing at the mouth
This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay.
I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.
I think one thing that I noticed this week in terms of "eye of the beholder" view on AI was the Goldman press release.
Apparently Anthropic has been in there for 6 months helping them with some back office streamlining and the outcome of that so far has been.. a press release announcing that they are working on it!
A cynic might also ask if this is simply PR for Goldman to get Anthropic's IPO mandate.
I think people underestimate the size/scope/complexity of big company tech stacks and what any sort of AI transformation may actually take.
It may turn into another cottage industry like big data / cloud / whatever adoption where "forward deployed / customer success engineers" are collocated by the 1000s for years at a time in order to move the needle.
At least they are consistently applying this to all roles instead of only making tech roles suffer through it like they do with interview processes
I'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.
Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :)
Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)
> Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know
Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.
If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further.
I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.
Okay, I use OpenCode/Codex/Gemini daily (and previously Opus 4.5 but cancelled CC given GPT 5.3 High/XHigh being better value) and have found it can provide value in certain parts of my job and personal projects.
But the evangelist insistence that it literally cannot be a net negative in any contexts/workflows is just exhausting to read and is a massive turn-off. Or that others may simply not benefit the same way with that different work style.
Like I said, I feel like I get net value out of it, but if my work patterns were scientifically studied and it turned out it wasn't actually a time saver on the whole I wouldn't be that surprised.
There are times where after knocking request after request out of the park, I spend hours wrangling some dumb failures or run into spaghetti code from the last "successful" session that massively slow down new development or require painful refactoring and start to question whether this is a sustainable, true net multiplier in the long term. Plus the constant time investment of learning and maintaining new tools/rules/hooks/etc that should be counted too.
But, I enjoy the work style personally so stick with it.
I just find FOMO/hype inherently off-putting and don't understand why random people feel they can confidently say that some random other person they don't know anything about is doing it wrong or will be "left behind" by not chasing constantly changing SOTA/best practices.
I try them a few times a month, always to underwhelming results. They're always wrong. Maybe I'll find an interesting thing to do with them some day, I dunno. It's just not a fun or interesting tool for me to learn to use so I'm not motivated. I like deterministic & understandable systems that always function correctly; "smart" has always been a negative term in marketing to me. I'm more motivated to learn to drive a city bus or walk a postal route or something, so that's the direction I'm headed in.
Maybe not everyone finds them as useful for their everyday tasks as you do? Software development is quite a broad term.
1. execs likely have spend commits and pressure from the board about their 'ai strategy', what better way to show we're making progress than stamping on some kpis like # of agents created?
2. most ai adoption is personal. people use whichever tools work for their role (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot)
3. there is some subset of ai detractors that refuse to use the tools for whatever reason
the metrics pushed by 1) rarely account for 2) and dont really serve 3)
i work at one of the 'hot' ai companies and there is no mandate to use ai... everyone is trusted to use whichever tools they pick responsibly which is how it should be imo
> (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot)
I seem to be using claude (sonnet/opus/haiku, not cc though), and have the option of using codex via my copilot account. Is there some advantage to using codex/claude more directly/not through copilot?
copilot is a much worse harness, although recently improvements in base model intelligence have helped it a bit
if you can, use cc or codex through your ide instead, oai and anthropic train on their own harnesses, you get better performance
I'm currently using opus in Zed via copilot (I think that's what you're recommending?) and tbh couldn't be happier. It's hard to imagine what better would look like.
oh, i meant copilot as in microsoft copilot in vscode. i havent used zed so can't speak to it but if it works for you it works!
The KPI problem is systemic and bigger than just Gen-AI, it’s in everything these days. Actual governance starts by being explicit about business value.
If you can’t state what a thing is supposed to deliver (and how it will be measured) you don’t have a strategy, only a bunch of activity.
For some reason the last decade or so we have confused activity with productivity.
(and words/claims with company value - but that's another topic)
Leadership loves AI more than anything they have ever loved before. It's because for them, the fawning, sycophantic, ego-stroking agents who cheerfully champions every dumb idea they have and helps them realize it with spectacular averageness, is EXACTLY what they've always expected to receive from their employees.
This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.
It's really cascaded down too.
Each department head needs to incorporate into their annual business plan how they are going to use a drill as part of their job in accounting/administration/mailroom.
Throughout the year, must coordinate training & enforce attendance for the people in their department with drill training mandated by the Head of Drilling.
And then they must comply with and meet drilling utilization metrics in order to meet their annual goals.
Drilling cannot be fail, it can only be failed.
Can I modify your example to:
Demanding everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant go out and buy a purple colored drill, never use any other colored drill, and use their purple drill for at least fifty minutes a day (to be confirmed by measuring battery charge).
Better, yeah.
Awesome, with that new policy we'll be sure to justify my purple drill evangelist role by showing that our average employee is dependent on purple drills for at least 1/8th of their workload. Who knew that our employees would so quickly embrace the new technology. Now the board can't cut me!
This is literally happening in non-tech finance firms where people in non-tech roles are being judged on their AI adoption.
Some companies swear by this. CP Rail is notorious for training everyone to drive a train.
That kind of makes sense philosophically if your business is trains, but I don't think that their business was AI agents. Although given they have a VP of AI, I have no idea. What a crazy title.
Reminds me of those little gadgets, which move your mouse, so that you show up online on Slack.
I’d just add a cron job to burn some tokens.
That sounds like a lot of work - maybe you could burn some tokens asking AI to write a cron to burn some tokens for you?
> We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing.
Enforced use means one of two things:
1. The tool sucks, so few will use it unless forced.
2. Use of the tool is against your interests as a worker, so you must be coerced to fuck yourself over (unless you're a software engineer, in which case you may excitedly agree to fuck yourself over willingly, because you're not as smart as you think you are).
3. They discovered it's something they can measure so they made a metric about it.
4. They heard from their golf buddy who heard from his racquetball buddy that this other CTO at this other shop is saving lots of money with AI
I know you're speaking half in jest but the C-suite of my area actually used a tweet by an OpenAI executive as the agenda for an AI brainstorm meeting.
Well that's inspiring. If you're going to follow anyone right now be sure to follow someone from the company that has committed to spending a trillion dollars without ever having a profitable product. Those are the folks who know what good business is!
It'll never cease to amaze me how many powerful people can't tell advice from advertising.
I am at less than half jest here.
I have friends who are finance industry CTOs, and they have described it to me in realtime as CEO FOMO they need to manage ..
Remember tech is sort of an odd duck in how open people are about things and the amount of cross pollination. Many industries are far more secretive and so whatever people are hearing about competitors AI usage is 4th hand hearsay telephone game.
edit: noteworthy someone sent yet another firmwide email about AI today which was just linking to some twitter thread by a VC AI booster thinkbro
Or it has an annoying learning curve.
That sounds awful... Thankfully our CTO is quite supportive of our teams anti-AI policy and is even supportive of posting our LLM-ban on job postings. I honestly dont think that I could operate in an environment with any sort of AI mandate...
That seems just as bad but the opposite direction.
I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.
The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment
It's not obvious because the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team. Which yeah is scary, but my point is if you don't see any multiplier effect from using that latest AI tools, you are either doing a bad job of using them (or don't have the budget, can't blame anyone for that), or are maybe in some obscure niche coding world?
I try these things a couple times a month. They're always underwhelming. Earlier this week I had the thing work tells me to use (claude code sonnet 4? something like that) generate some unit tests for a new function I wrote. I had a number of objections about the utility of the test cases it chose to write, but the largest problem was that it assigned the expected value to a test case struct field and then... didn't actually validate the retrieved value against it. If you didn't review the code, you wouldn't know that the test it wrote did literally nothing of value.
Another time I asked it to rename a struct field across a the whole codebase. It missed 2 instances. A simple sed & grep command would've taken me 15 seconds to write and do the job correctly and cost $~0.00 compute, but I was curious to see if the AI could do it. Nope.
Trillions of dollars for this? Sigh... try again next week, I guess.
Twice now in this same story, different subthreads, I've seen AI dullards declaring that you, specifically, are holding it wrong. It's delightful, really.
Try Opus?
Eh, there's a new shiny thing every 2 months. I'm waiting for the tools to settle down rather than keep up with that treadmill. Or I'll just go find a new career that's more appealing.
It seems that the rate of change will only accelerate.
I dunno. At some point the people who make these tools will have to turn a profit, and I suspect we'll find out that 98% of the AI industry is swimming naked.
> I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting.
I am aware of a large company that everyone in the US has heard of, planning on laying off 30% of their devs shortly because they expect a 30% improvement in "productivity" from the remaining dev team.
Exciting indeed. Imagine all the divorces that will fall out of this! Hopefully the kids will be ok, daddy just had an accident, he won't be coming home.
If you think anything that is happening with the amount of money and bullshit enveloping this LLM disaster, you should put the keyboard down for a while.
Same here in LATAM. We are also an AI-First company now. No customer-first, or product-first, or data-driven (I actually liked the idea behind being data-driven). All the code must be AI-generated by the end of Q1. All the employees must include at least one AI-adoption metric or project in their goals.
Fiverr CEO goes on a pretty dark rant about how people who don’t upskill and convert to AI workflows will have to change professions, etc.
Then concludes his email with:
> I have asked Shelly to free up time on my calendar next week so people can have conversations with me about our future.
I assume Shelly is an AI, and not human headcount the CEO is wasting on menial admin tasks??
I like to think if someone can't be bothered to write something, I can't be bothered to read it.
seems to be a pattern:
[Company that's getting disrupted by AI: Fiverr, Duolingo]: rush to adopt internal AI to cut costs before they get undercut by competition
[Company that's orthogonal: Box, Ramp, HFT]: build internal tools to boost productivity, maintain 'ai-first' image to keep talent
[Company whose business model is AI]: time to go all in
Why wouldn't HFT be disrupted by AI? AI-enhanced trading algo designs are likely to be competitive? AI disrupts everything on the computer from the low-end on up. The higher end requires more expensive or custom models that aren't as easy to obtain yet.
HFT is about the last technical domain that could possibly be touched by LLMs. There is next to no good training data and there is zero margin for error.
Because HFT is about adversarial play with a lot of hidden information.
Relevant article from two days ago https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning
i mean llms
happy to be corrected but im not aware of any direct improvements llms bring to ultra low latency market making, time to first token is just too high (not including coding agents)
from talking to some friends in the space theres some meaningful improvements in tooling especially in discretionary trading that operate on longer time horizons where agents can actually help w research and sentiment analysis
The Klarna guy:
>The misconceptions about Klarna and AI adoption baffle me sometimes.
>Yes, we removed close to 1,500 micro SaaS services and some large. Not to save on licenses, but to give AI the cleanest possible context.
If you remove all your services...
That Fiverr one seems especially cold somehow. I guess it lines up with their business model though.
It also lines up with what has to be their outlook on the market, their model is especially challenged by AI. Years ago I paid for a Ukrainian to write me some scrapers, today that would be a quick project in Cursor. Lots of people used it for cheap art, voice work, etc, now the low end is all AI.
What are the AI-never companies doing? May be a useful comparison. Is the AI work actually improving the bottom line, or is it being used to assuage noisy shareholders that think AI is a hack for infinite profit?
If the person who wrote this is reading, many of us block tracking in our browsers and all we see for each of those X embeds is
"X trackers and content blocked
Your Firefox settings blocked this content from tracking you across sites or being used for ads."
Screenshots don't track me so they would be ok.
I'm not sure a person wrote this website, but FYI on Firefox Nightly the text of the tweet is shown below the blocked tracker in a box labeled "Content from blocked embed". It doesn't have images or longer posts, so not that useful for this specific website, but it's a nice feature. It also gives you a link to the tweet so you can easily open it in a private window or XCancel if you want to.
If you hire good people and set proper incentives they will figure out the best way to do something. If leadership has to direct employees to use AI it's a bad sign. If it were a huge boon to productivity, you won't need to force people to use it.
May I suggest directly hosting the images and text instead of embedding the x and linked in posts.
You could use AI to summarize the website without X and LinkedIn embedding code.
This reads like they don't want AI, they just want tooling. More, better tooling. AI is just a scapegoat/easy out for writing more tooling that makes them more efficient.
CEOs want productivity. They don't want employees. Employees are a cost center.
Employees also make for customers. Not sure how AIs and robots will be replacing human consumers once CEOs realize their dream.
> Within weeks, CEOs across industries posted their own versions. The AI-first memo became a genre. Here they all are.
That may be all the publicly-posted ones, but I'm skeptical. They have 11.
There were a lot more internal memos.
Isn’t there tons more, like the note from Andy Jassy at Amazon and the CEO at Airwallex etc? Maybe you can use an ai agent to find all the other big examples? ;-)
Its easier to adopt AI when starting from scratch or code base is well maintained.
The software defined storage company croit.io announced it in their Workation in May 2023. AI is just another tool and people have to understand that it's not going away. As a company, you still need people to make use of this tool.
This is "AGI".
Also notice how almost all the stocks of these companies except Meta who have announced AI-first initiatives are at best flat or down but more than 20% YTD.
What does that tell you?
[flagged]
"Please don't fulminate."