Are people's bosses making them use AI tools?

Summary

This is not the usual type of content you will have come to expect from Piccalilli, but I feel like this topic, specifically, is an important aspect of our work to cover because as I see it, making or encouraging your development staff to use AI tools in their work is extremely short-sighted and risky. I want to support that stance with some conversations I’ve had with people actually doing the work and their mostly less than favourable experiences. I asked this across question social media: Is your boss encouraging you to/making you use AI tools for development? I’m thinking about working on a piece about that on Piccalilli. It’s sensitive for sure, so more than happy for people to be anonymised. The reason I asked was because — as you can imagine — I speak with a lot of developers on a day-to-day basis. A lot of the time in my personal network, these are very experienced, senior developers, but I’m hearing the same stories from juniors too. It boils down to: My boss is making/encouraging me to use AI every day and during every part of my work. I had an urge to explore this further — making sure I wasn’t in an echo chamber — and, yeh, you’re probably not going to enjoy what I discovered. Before we dig in, allow me to set some ground rules and factspermalink If you’re a fan of AI companies/tools, this article is not a personal attack on your preference This article does not de-value the good stuff you might feel like you’re doing with AI All participants are completely anonymised for their privacy and protection I have re-worked some of the responses to assist with point 3 Any opinions are mine unless specified What I learned from my conversationspermalink I’ve had several conversations with developers and designers working across the industry for this piece, all with varying experience levels. I spoke with a developer working in the science industry who told me, “I saw your post on Bluesky about bosses encouraging AI use. Mine does but in a really weird way. We’re ...