Attended an AI Productivity sesssion

Posted by Careless_Insect1958@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 45 comments

Basically what the title says. The guy was selling BI using simple English, he didn’t even create or own the tool, he was just peddling Claude connected to MPC which is just a fancy way of saying give access to your database to Claude so it can read the database metadata and run queries. He was pitching this for product managers by the way so they can ask questions in English!

What did he do during the 45 minutes:

Downloaded his ‘production’ database to local machine Showed a pip install mentioning this might be a bit technical for the audience Showed a json config file with database connection( I hope the local and production password were not same, but I am not so sure with this guy) Told to download Claude desktop since this does not work with Claude web.

Here is few things I noticed during his demo with ‘production’ data

His database only had 2 tables named user and data. 2 He created very simple pie chart and bar chart. 3 Talked about being very good at SQL and mentioned Claude is very smart to have used the json function since some of his columns are JSON based. 4 Ran an example which did not work to show the challenges with the setup but lo and behold today the example worked while it did it work 2 days ago and he mentioned this shows how quickly AI is getting better. 5 Gave a pitch for his AI productivity course in the end. 6 The charts he did create, he couldn’t even replicate, basically the LLM shit the bed in between the chart, so he ran the same prompt but this time the chart layout changed, even though the data remained the same

All in all I found him a major grifter with nothing to show, just jumping on the hype train and making others feeling FOMO. He did mention in the end he is implementing all this in his tool right now even if it makes mistakes because he wants to stay ahead of everyone in case AI gets very good at this stuff.

I think a lot of the AI stuff is being handled this way right now, these people are just making everyone use AI without even checking that it will work or not. He will get paid for his course since there were many non tech managers who will just ask their dev team to take the course.

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Fair_Local_588@reddit

My job has heavily pushed AI and AI tooling and I now hardly use it beyond GitHub Copilot and doing unimportant but arduous tasks that are okay if they’re wrong. Last thing I did was asked it to rename references to a class and it added a completely random line of code to one of the classes. It’s too random and it’s nondeterministic for things that need to be.

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nachohk@reddit

Last thing I did was asked it to rename references to a class

Since when did we need a flaky LLM for this?

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Fair_Local_588@reddit

Answered elsewhere but my company has a bunch of generated code based on some source Java files, so updating the source files using the IDE doesn’t update the generated files or their references.

By hand I need to update the source files, clean and rebuild the project, then go to each generated file reference and find+replace the field name changes as they’re now out of sync.

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gyroda@reddit

Yep, I can do this with one shortcut in VScode (f2) or VS (ctrl-r-r)

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eslof685@reddit

"Last thing I did was asked it to rename references to a class" lmao!

New/Jr coders these days lol.. asking AI instead of just pressing the rename hot key.

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Fair_Local_588@reddit

We have a lot of generated code. It was renaming and restructuring the classes, which when done using the IDE tooling took around a half hour.

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LetterBoxSnatch@reddit

When using the deterministic tool it took 30 minutes? How long for the indeterminate tool that added lines?

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Fair_Local_588@reddit

Yeah. The AI (Cursor) took multiple iterations because it kept missing things, probably around 10 minutes. But I only realized that it added code when I went to review it and saw it didn’t compile anymore and immediately had 0 trust in it. Anything could have gotten lost in all of that boilerplate change.

I only use it now to “summarize” my branch’s diff with master for a PR description. But same thing - I give it a structure and it will randomly add or remove sections, move subsections around, etc. But at least that saves me a tiny bit of time.

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Positive-Anywhere872@reddit

My very first Javascript workshop was done by a guy that knew nothing about Javascript or programming in general.

During these seminars he asked me if there was an open position for a web developer.

I found him a developer position in the company I used to work which he managed to stay longer than I did as I was laid off because they thought I was paid too much.

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Careless_Insect1958@reddit (OP)

It’s salesmanship all the way!

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jozefizso@reddit

How does he stay ahead of everyone exactly? If the AI tools really become that powerful, anybody will be able to catch up to his level easily.

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Careless_Insect1958@reddit (OP)

He is just selling a course, he doesn’t need to stay ahead of anything, if he good he knows the tooling he is selling is not useful, is he isn’t good, he doesn’t care about getting ahead anyway, it’s just short term money to him.

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__loam@reddit

MPC is so funny. It's such a thin and trivial wrapping over simple function calls.

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NatoBoram@reddit

They should've just made a tool to convert openapi schemas into tools…

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Cool_As_Your_Dad@reddit

And companies will jump on this.. because AI. You can tell/show them it doesn't work... but they have to be able to say "We got AI"....

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ccb621@reddit

No need to rant. Just ignore it and move on.

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SketchySeaBeast@reddit

The problem is this is being sold to exec and they are buying it.

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KrispyCuckak@reddit

Think of the $$$ contractors will make when they're hired to clean up the eventual mess.

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Careless_Insect1958@reddit (OP)

This is the issue, even if I was able to spot the issues, I still need to run it locally and check it it will be useful to us.

It is obvious to me it won’t be useful since I have 300 tables to work with, that guy worked with 2 tables, the number of tables being the least bit of problem with this.

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relevant_tangent@reddit

Wouldn't AI be more useful for 300 tables than for 2?

I mean, it doesn't sound like whatever the guy did is worth anything. But the concept of hooking up Claude to your database to let "salt of the earth" people interact with it seems fine?..

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UsualNoise9@reddit

That’s a good point though - if the execs are buying into this, you are getting a front row seat observing how your execs are making decisions which directly impact your livelihood. Make of this what you will.

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Careless_Insect1958@reddit (OP)

Obviously nobody wants to do something which is doomed from onset(maybe 1% probability this works out good for them), but the market is shit at the moment.

In even recent interviews lot of people(managers) mentioned they are incorporating LLM to do BI stuff and what not, it’s quite frustrating. I would happily implement AI if I saw the outcome would be usable or at least provide some value, but this is just massive waste of effort on all ends, only the grifter gets to make money, everybody else is worse off!

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abeuscher@reddit

Yeah this is the truth. I had to spend 9 months talking one of my old bosses out of Webflow because he liked their marketing so much. We were running a site in 16 languages that changed daily with tons of contributors and I have 30 years as dev. It took so much time to refute it made us both look like assholes.

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Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit

This sounds more like /r/OfficePolitics than /r/ExperiencedDevs imo.

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SketchySeaBeast@reddit

When it comes to technology decisions that are going to effect your team, they are one and the same.

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Material_Policy6327@reddit

This so much this

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kenflingnor@reddit

How can we ignore shit like this when moron execs eat it up?

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fireheart337@reddit

I think its important to give real world examples of how all of these "AI tools that will take your job" are actually being pitched and demoed.

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Material_Policy6327@reddit

Sounds like every sales demo I’d ever seen

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throwawayacc201711@reddit

“Don’t worry we can do that”

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obviousoctopus@reddit

Great! Please kindly show us how it works, with our use case, today, or call us when you can.

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angrathias@reddit

“Yep, that’s coming in the next update”

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becuzz04@reddit

Narrator: Upon telling the developers that he sold this feature he learned that they could not, in fact, do that. And it would take far longer than the promised 6 week timeline.

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throwawayacc201711@reddit

Guys what’s a death march here or there gonna do to morale. Surely it’ll improve it, no? Whatever, just hit the deadline.

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db_peligro@reddit

we're gonna have a pizza party as a thank you!

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Material_Policy6327@reddit

Wooops we lost money this quarter no pizza party and now layoffs!

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abeuscher@reddit

I worked in a startup years ago, and some guys came in for a sales demo for some stupid PM product that some new hire was trying to force down our throats. Halfway through the presentation the CMO stood up and said "Okay my team - we're leaving. This is a waste of time. These guys don't know what they're talking about." She was right and it was marvelous to watch it all fall apart.

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madhousechild@reddit

Oof, imagine being those guys.

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levelworm@reddit

That's exactly what I thought was going to happen, albeit a very crappy show. Product managers and other business stakeholders are eager to integrate AI so that they can do something on their own, instead of waiting for the "slow" developers to do their job.

Any position directly facing these business stakeholders is in danger. Frontend and data might be the first two fields impacted because the fields are crawling with self-taught developers and stakeholders are breathing under their necks.

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jfcarr@reddit

Is "AI" the code name for a "vibe coder" in Malaysia who'll work for less than even an Indian dev?

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robby_arctor@reddit

The Whole Foods model of automation

My only solace is being able to laugh at these assholes and their most zealous adherents

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