>If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

I run a small business with two employees.

N=2 here, of course, but one of them will experiment with any new process you introduce (as well as plenty more that you don't!)

The other will keep doing what he's always been doing, even if it's frustrating and inefficient, unless you monitor him and force him to use the new process.

I could imagine most "normal employers" would understand that both type of person exists and, assuming you're getting good first impressions from group A, it's usually better off in the long run to shove the new process down group B's throat.

(This isn't to say that the "Group B" employee is less valuable or anything - he is more conscientious and reliable than anyone else we've ever hired - but just that different people need different management styles)

> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

because that would require actually admitting that employees are the people in an organisation who are responsible for the success of that organisation, rather than the people higher up the org chart.

> The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world

People are stubborn. A lot of productivity improvements had to be almost forced upon farmers, for example. Even when early adopters demonstrated the benefits, a decent fraction of them just didn’t want to change.

> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively?

Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.

Because people don't know what they want until they have and use it. Faster horses, etc. One can only really implement systemic change from the top down, as Moloch indicates.

> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world.

For one, software tools are cheap, especially with OSS in the mix. You're buying one "tool" and paying for operational expenses that scale with total usage across all company.

But secondly, and more importantly, the "consulting" and discussing was done over the period of last 3 years, by ~1 year ago the high-level conclusions were pretty much locked in, the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point, so I can see why tokenmaxxing would be where this ended up, even though (here I disagree with the article a bit) the tools aren't at the "compounding correctness" stage just yet. It's really quite simple: the stick didn't work (telling people in increasingly direct ways to try using AI for stuff), so they tried the carrot.

$deity knows a good chunk of engineers will inadvertently fall for any trick that involves a scoreboard. That holds even when they're perfectly aware they're being tricked.

> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

Again, they did that, they've been doing it continuously over past 3 years. Some people are excited, some people don't care, but some - a population that's definitely overrepresented in HN comments - just stubbornly refuse to try. Now that the answers are in, and they speak in favor of AI, the companies are doing what "any normal employer would": trying to get the stubborn employers to do their job they way their bosses want them to.

(In fact, normal employers would be more eager to fire people who keep refusing top-down instructions - but it's also obvious this technology is experimental; the models and harnesses get more powerful faster than people can learn to use them - so carrots make more sense than sticks in this transition period. Stubborn people begrudgingly using those tools offer an entirely unique perspective and explore use cases and approaches that you won't get from excited adopters.)

> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively?

I mean, the difference in the metaphor is that we have pretty fully understood carpentry for many hundreds of years. We still find it difficult to write even simple software to address all our needs, as is evidenced by the insane pay in our industry. Carpenters can suggest tools because they know what's out there. The same was not true about LLMs a year ago.

> That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics

People get fired for all kinds of reasons including no reason at all. Oftentimes leadership even lies about the real reasons for firing people because they don't sound good!

I'm gonna be blunt: if you're in software and you refuse to use AI for moral reasons, I think you should be fired. There's being principled and there's being obstinate and the difference between the two is how well you can convince people that you _have_ principles. Most LLM-hating people fall short on this point, because

> do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote?

Sure! Link it again, we all know it's highly immoral when shovel salesmen try to make you want shovels.

> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

I do not like this HN take of "let's do this thing that works great in small companies and then just blindly pretend that it'll also work at the largest companies in the world!" No, this doesn't work at "normal companies" because you cannot "just ask" 30k+ employees what they want.

Employees, like EVERYONE ELSE, are resistant to change. If I, as CEO of a company, want to get my company to try Claude I have to measure tokens to see if it's getting used. That's it. There's no wave of delusion here.

Because Japanese hand tools are objectively less efficient than power tools in a carpentry shop. The guys that want to use hand tools can go work in a boutique that charges a premium for that level of craftsmanship. If you told them to use power tools, no amount of utility would convince them to use them, with most of their justification being psychological. Also, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Because those power tools had just been invented and no one had experience with them.

Though in theory power tools are faster than hand tools.

The logic of trusting employees who are worried that power tools will replace them to utilize power tools effectively is completely backwards in any sane world. People don’t like change, sometimes it needs to be forced on them.