Some people genuinely want to help others, without any immediately visible reward.
I won’t say it’s necessarily altruistic, as of course there could be a drive from inner machinations that we’d never be privy to.
(Sometimes the exposure of an article can be considered a reward, for those looking for ego inflation)
Even myself, I generally don’t leave comments unless I feel they’re going to be helpful or insightful to someone else.
But I am also biased, as I do have a very strong affinity towards sharing information, so I greatly appreciate the effort artisans and those more knowledgeable than I go through to share such knowledge.
This may be true in some cases, but I’ve also seen issues with too many stamps, signatures, red-tape, tribunals/committees, and multi-stage approval chains.
There’s a balance somewhere put there, but that balance is different for everyone.
Personally I think problematic decision making is more to do with the “blame” side of ownership. It benefits the unsure more than the certain, and not many people are okay with making and admitting to mistakes.
Mostly because there are different depths of reporting required depending who you’re creating said reports for. Often it’s unnecessary bureaucracy, but also often the ones doing the “actual work” don’t have a full understanding of how what they’re working on interacts with other parts of a system. (I mean this broadly, and not just related to software development)
Middle management can sometimes be good at this, because they may actually have the time to step back and take a holistic look at things. It’s not always easy to do that when you’re deep in the weeds with clients, managers, colleagues, or direct reports bugging you about misc things.
Overall I think (or hope) the more useless reporting will die a slow death, but I also think there’ll be a loooooong period of AI slop before we reach the point where everyone says “why are we actually doing this?”
I wouldn't call myself an 'experienced' developer, but I do find LLMs useful for once-off things, where I can't justify the effort to research and implement my own solution. Two recent examples come to mind:
1. Converting exported data into a suitable import format based on a known schema
2. Creating syntax highlighting rules for language not natively support in a Typst report
Both situations didn't have an existing solution, and while the outputs were not exactly correct, they only needed minor adjustments.
Any other situation, I'd generally prefer to learn how to do the thing, since understanding how to do something can sometimes be as important as the result.
It's an interesting dilemma, since if I know that an email was written mostly with AI, it feels to me like the author didn't put effort in, and thus I won't put much effort into reading the email.
I had a conversation with my manager about the implications of everyone using AI to write/summarise everything. The end result will most likely be staff getting Copilot to generate a report, then their manager uses Copilot to summarise the report and generate a new report for their manager, ad inifinitum.
Eventually all context is lost, busywork is amplified, and nobody gains anything.
I won’t say it’s necessarily altruistic, as of course there could be a drive from inner machinations that we’d never be privy to.
(Sometimes the exposure of an article can be considered a reward, for those looking for ego inflation)
Even myself, I generally don’t leave comments unless I feel they’re going to be helpful or insightful to someone else. But I am also biased, as I do have a very strong affinity towards sharing information, so I greatly appreciate the effort artisans and those more knowledgeable than I go through to share such knowledge.