> 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.