this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
1073 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

77084 readers
2585 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
1073
I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. (open.substack.com)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
296 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I'm just sharing this because I found it insightful.

The author describes himself as a "fractional CTO"(no clue what that means, don't ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] III@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The LLM comparison to a team of human developers is a great example. But like outsourcing your development, LLM is less a tool and more just delegation. And yes, you can dig in deep to understand all the stuff the LLM is delegated to do the same as you can get deeply involved with a human development team to maintain an understanding. But most of the time, the sell is that you can save time - which means you aren't expecting to micro manage your development team.

It is a fractional CTO problem but the actual issue is that developers are being demanded to become fractional CTOs by using LLM because they are being measured by expected productivity increases that limit time for understanding.

[–] Upgrayedd1776@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

thats an interesting take, developers are demanded to also become fractional CTO, there is probably a larger than estimated knowledge and experience gap there and unless you have the knack for managing people you probably run into more problems than you are used to normally being just a code jockey

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago

the sell is that you can save time

How do you know when salespeople (and lawyers) are lying? It's only when their lips are moving.

developers are being demanded to become fractional CTOs by using LLM because they are being measured by expected productivity increases that limit time for understanding.

That's the kind of thing that works out in the end. Like outsourcing to Asia, etc. It does work for some cases, it can bring sustainable improvements to the bottom line, but nowhere near as fast or easy or cheaply as the people selling it say.