Ask HN: Is your company forcing use of AI?

Not being forced, but the peer pressure is getting pretty strong.

Claude Code i will admit i find occasionally useful, but the flood of overly verbose and lackingly meaningful "AI Summaries" I'm being forced to waste time reading is really grating on me. Copilot PR summaries turning a 20-line PR into a fifty-line unhelpful essay is driving me insane.

We have Cursor, it’s a step back from using Claude + MCP and it hallucinates a lot because of poor context management. But that’s not the real reason I’m using LLM’s less than before.

* The codebase consists of many modules with their own repo each

* The test back end has a lot of gotchas, borked settings or broken ongoing work by the back-end team

* The code is incredibly layered

I’m spending up to 10% of my time writing actual code. The rest is overhead like multi-repo PR’s, debugging, talking to people etcetera.

Once I found the issue, the code is the easy part and explaining it all to the LLM is more work.

Assistive coding tools need to get a lot better

Not forced. Encouraged. Everyone used it earlier without revealing it, now it is open. Knowing how and when to use your tools properly is a good idea.

We are forcing non-use because of compliance. There is a fear that the models will scan and steal our proprietary code.

No. My employer released their official AI policy not long ago, and it codifies what has been their unofficial policy for a while now: you can use it if you want to, but you'll have to pay for it out of your own pocket.

Not forced but the tooling has been made available to those who ask. Work have provided Microsoft Copilot through Teams and Github Copilot through my IDE of choice.

I found the Microsoft Copilot to be reasonably good when given a complete context with extremely limited scope such as being provided a WSDL for a SOAP service and asked to write functions that make calls and then writing unit tests for the whole thing. This had a right way and a wrong way of doing things and it did it almost perfectly.

However, if you give it any problem that requires imagination with n+1 ways of being done it flounders and produces mostly garbage.

Compared to the Microsoft Copilot I found the Github Copilot to feel lobotomised! It failed on the aforementioned WSDL task and where Microsoft's could be asked "what inconsistencies can you see in this WSDL" and catch all of them, Github's was unable to answer beyond pointing out a spelling mistake I had already made it aware of.

I have personally tinkered with Claude, and its quite impressive.

My colleagues have had similar experiences, with some uninstalling the AI tooling out of frustration at how "useless" it is. Others, like myself, have begun using it for the grunt work; mostly as "inteligent boilerplate generator."

Yes. However, really it’s our lead VC investors who are forcing it and want to see us have 75-100% AI teams. Yet now we’re in a mini panic after customers said the core functionality of my team’s product isn’t up to muster. So we’ll probably put the AI features on hold while marketing calls our non-AI features “powered by AI”.

I suppose us engineers familiar with the product had just a bit more context than the investors issuing a blanket statement to their portfolios to use AI.

At least in my 2.5 person devops team, no.

Also I can't imagine how being handed a bunch of autogenerated terraform and ansible code would help me. Maybe 10% of my time is spent actually writing the code, the rest is running it (ansible is slow), troubleshooting incidents, discussing how to solve them & how to implement new stuff, etc.

If someone works in a devops position where AI is more of a threat, I'd like to hear more about it.

Yes. I work for a large financial institution and they are all in on AI. All managers and tech leads have been instructed to apply AI as much as possible and to shoehorn it into every single thing because the company has made a BIG public announcement that their future is AI. So now they are desperately trying to find ways to back up those claims.

To be honest. I think it's pretty cool tech (I mostly use copilot with either Claude Sonnet 3.7 or 4, or otherwise GTP 4.1). Agent mode is cool. I use it every day and it has helped me work faster, do better work by it preemptively catering for things that might have otherwise taken many iterations of releases to discover, so yeah, I think AI is pretty good for software developers overall. It's a great tool to have. Is it going to do my work and leave me redundant? Not any time soon. I think the company I work for will fail in their enforced AI efforts, spend a gazillion dollars and will go quietly back to outsourcing overseas when the dust settles. I feel sad for the junior devs though as they are basically vibe coding their way through Jira tickets atm. I am a graybeard, 30+ years in the industry.

Ours is going the other way and wanting people not to use it. A losing battle but the people making decisions are a bit fuddy duddy about this sort of stuff, we just keep getting links posted about how much energy it consumes talking to chatgpt.

It's not forced, but the atmosphere has definitely shifted. These days, before we even start on a task, the first question is often "Can we solve this with AI?" Over time, it starts to feel like we're working around the tool instead of focusing on the actual problem.

The company where i work is actually halting all AI Projects for next couple of months due to huge cost involved, however copilot stays. Fintech

Non devs: forced to use AI tools. Devs: officially not forced but so strongly encouraged that it's de facto forced. Personally I agree with both the reasoning and execution of this process shift.

No one’s being forced, but we’re encouraged to explore and experiment with AI tools. And not just for writing code. It's a quite firm belief in the company as a whole that the winners in the 'AI age' will be the companies that are able to utilize AI tools improve their internal workflows and become more productive. So we get to try out lots of different things, and we make sure to share our learnings with each other.

I work at a small web company (.net based, Netherlands) and we're just experimenting with it. We have a paid copilot subscription, but nothing about it is mandatory in any way. But this place is conservative in the sense that self hosting is the norm and cloud services like Azure or even github (we self host Gitea) are not, other than MS 365 for Teams and e-mail.

This years management goals have been crafted with the help of our in-house AI assistant.

The development and project teams I primarily work with are all encouraged to identify suitable use cases for GenAI. Most development teams have already started trials with AI assisted coding but reported a relatively low adoption rate of 5–10%.

At least 20% of code must be AI generated with the goal of at least 80% by the end of the year. CEO declared that vibe coders create better solutions because they are “goal oriented” as opposed to traditional coders that are “process oriented”.

Our company is relatively old (20+ years), mid size, hardware oriented and has a lot of people of all ages. For now neural network use is carefully allowed and encouraged to try out of a list of allowed LLMs only, but it's not mandatory and not forced (yet). There is also an internal project based on NNs to automate log analysis, but it is very early from possibly becoming a useful product, too many noise and useless non-actionable results.

Not us, but I know people who are coerced to use AI for programming, where for example KPIs are tied to LLM usage.

Is this similar to companies forcing TDD or extreme programming or pair programming on their employees? Some manager hoping to get more productivity by imposing a tool or technique?

Forced, no. The consulting company that employs me is talking about AI constantly and our internal viva engage is full och people talking about it. None of them are programmers.

The client I work at, through them, has made some tools available but no-one is using them for anything.

No, and most seems to avoid using AIs for pretty much anything. The usage I've seen has been mostly inspirational.

We are allowed to use AI for coding, with the understanding that we are responsible for the code generated by the AI, not legally obviously, but functionally.

Not forced yet, but we have a lower risk appetite than your average firm. If it is used, instructions are clear that the output should not be treated as gospel and verse. Haven't heard of any major issues as a result of unfiltered, unreviewed AI dumps (yet).

Yes, and we even hired a guy to do it. He's a young fellow who has been using every AI tool under the sun, seemingly forever. Also well connected in the space. He comes up with various suggestions about how to use all the tools.

I'm certainly seeing the benefits. A lot of tasks are faster with AI. Even some quite fiddly bits of log-diving and finding subtle bugs can be done by AI, which would have taken me considerably longer.

I'm still finding that overall architecture needs to be done by me, though. Once you make the task big enough, AI goes off the rails and makes some really odd stuff.

We're among the companies that decided to be "AI-first" - whatever that means. They are spending huge amount of money and effort to deploy AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, etc.

I'm kinda worried about how the massive usage of AI coding tool will affect the understanding of large codebases and complex systems, but to be totally honest I'm really impressed by Claude Code and how it can write Terraform/Helm/Ruby based on the company's idioms (and I'm talking about a repository with 250k+ lines of HCL!).

It would also be interesting to know how using AI is encouraged.

What are best practices? What tools are genuinely helpful, such as automatic reviews in a build street, or sentiment analysis in commit messages?

Using Gemini Pro. No, I adopted it all on my own, but work pays. I love it, even though I can't use it on everything. Most developers here are using it, with approval on a per-projext basis.

Lately it's taken over code reviews, for myself and when I review other people's code. Extremely helpful. It's made software development fun again.

No, but I wish it did for stuff like summarizing meetings, etc.

Everybody focuses on programming, but the real value in is project management imho.

Not forced, no. I guess you could say "encouraged" but honestly I don't think our people need a lot of encouragement. There seems to be a lot of inherent demand for AI tools, to the point that some people are chafing at our inability to move even faster on rolling stuff out.

The place I work seems to be open to the fact that its not an all seeing, all knowing force in the world. Though we do use it as a quicker search engine.

I've heard of companies that are shoehorning it into everything, I feel this is many companies just playing the game to get better valuations.

I usually use AI to draw pictures, write texts, and organize materials. For example, when I make PPT or WeChat articles, I let AI help me come up with titles and polish paragraphs, which saves me a lot of time.

Yes, and it's tracked, so I've started shifting personal AI use to company-provide accounts to "get credit" for using AI more.

It's really interesting to see the extreme contrast between the constant praise of AI coding tools here on HN vs the actual real world performance as seen recently on public Microsoft repos, where it utterly fails at even the most basic tasks.

Encouraged for learning/examples, the company has an enterprise subscription for employees.

Permitted for development with the explicit caveat that code is always the responsibility of the people connected to the pull request.

It's considered a minimum skill requirement to know how and when to use AI and to actually then use it, yes. I haven't seen managers enforce it but the CEO already said so. In practice there are still people who are resistant of course.

Our company is positioned right at the edge of the wave for this though so it's understandable.

nah mate. the talk of ai usage has dwindled down but from time to time, i see people use it.

Not forced, but strongly encouraged. Even security guidelines that we had been required to follow for the previous 10 years are being thrown out the window to make way for the AI train.

I've already communicated that I don't want to see nor hear the "but AI generated it this way" opinions. But other than that, I can see the potential, and I'm using it as well. Just not for generation of production code, rather to test assumptions, maybe initial implementations, to make things faster, but in the end I'm always reimplementing it anyway.

Also, to be completely honest, AI does better code reviews than most of my coworkers.

Not forced, at least of yet. The executive wing won't stop talking about it though. I imagine I'm gonna start getting the stink eye at some point since I don't use it.

Force? No. But an awful lot of trainings, and clients always ask about AI strategy.

We recently got Claude Code and there is a very strong push to use it.

I recently did for the first time. Spent 15 minutes writing a long prompt to implement a ticket. A repeated pattern of code, 5 classes + config per topic that deeply interact with each other and it did the job perfectly.

It convinced me that the current code monkey jobs, which are >90%, >95%? of software engineering jobs, will disappear within 10 years.

We‘ll only need senior/staff/architect level code reviewers and prompt engineers.

When the last generation that manually wrote code dies out, all people will do is prompting.

Just like assembler became a niche, just like C became a niche, high level languages will become a niche.

If you still don‘t believe, you haven‘t tried the advanced tools that can modify a whole project, are too incompetent to properly prompt or indeed work in one of the rare, arcane frontier- state-of-the-art niches where AI can‘t help.

The following is a year 2,065 Bed Time Story featuring a childhood lesson of being adaptable: "Near the end of the 2020s those who rejected AI out of misunderstanding were left behind; those who embraced it grew wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile, the anti-adopters lived miserably, consumed by resentment, blaming everyone and everything for their plight except themselves and their own failure to adapt."