You don't know how to use AI

https://www.anitakirkovska.com/blog/you-dont-know-how-to-use-ai/

by anitakirkovska • 2 months ago

7 3 2 months ago

At the same time, companies are desperate for high-leverage hires. ClickUp, let go 22% of their workers, and introduced new $1M salary bands to attract agentic-native humans.

I'm sorry, but what does "agentic-native" even mean? Is the author assuming that for some people the ability to fluently manipulate AI agents is inborn behavior instead of learned. It sounds like a HR person writing a job listing that demands five years of experience with a framework that came out last week.

Furthermore, wouldn't it have been cheaper to retain and retrain existing employees? Laying off people to try to hire people who already learned AI elsewhere throws away existing institutional knowledge, seems like bad PR to me, and is immediately more expensive if you're introducing seven-figure salary bands to attract "fresh" talent instead of keeping the people you already have on the payroll.

Also, why should I even consider working for a company that laid people off to chase a trend. What's to stop them from throwing me under a bus when the next trend comes along?

anitakirkovska• 2 months ago

Oh yeah agree with you on the first comment, it's hard to compete for sure. New frameworks are out by the day. But at this point the "skills" you develop around your work will work with any framework/assistant/platform. That's the goal of the post: to give you a direction on how to build your own AI leverage.

Re "Clickup": I'm not at all trying to say that you should be excited to work there. My point of the post is to say how you can build defensibility against companies like Clickup laying you off and/or how to make yourself a bit more valuable for the market today. It's a game we all play.

someone on twitter just summarized this pretty nicely: The company's race is to replace you before they collapse under their own weight and market pressures.

Your race is to replace them before they finish or the market finishes them.

BelovedAntipop2• 2 months ago

My leverage is in not depending on "AI", and in possessing the experience, judgment, and discernment no LLM can emulate. That, and my willingness to maintain complete confidentiality; no LLM can be trusted to do that. Also, I can cope with Indian English and not get pedantic if somebody comes to me with doubts instead of questions.

Nor am I worried about being laid off, because I'm not a W2 employee. I'm a 1099 mercenary. I do the job, and then I get paid. If my contract doesn't get renewed, I take a week or two off and get another one. Every company is replaceable to me, and I'm replaceable to every company until they figure out I'm not, and then try to make me a FTE.

At which point I laugh at them, because I have no interest in being their idea of a culture fit, and I'm not passionate about tech. I'm passionate about getting paid. If the next gig wants me to babysit a clanker or give it instructions, that's what I'll do. If it requires reading reams of COBOL and JCL that nobody has touched in decades because it's a mind-shredding post-Lovecraftian horror, I'll do that. Hell, I'll even deal with VB6 if the hourly rate's high enough.

I refuse on principle to give so much as a damn. If there's a paycheck in it, and I don't regard the principal as unethical, I'll take the contract.

#RoninLife

Finally, I still don't think you've explained what it means for people to be agentic-native. I'm not convinced it's even possible to be that. Nor am I convinced that agents can do anything that a sufficiently skilled UNIX graybeard can't do with a makefile, a shell script, some awk, or some Perl. Except pass a culture fit interview at $STARTUP.

Honestly? I'm looking forward to somebody writing "Command-line tools can be 235x faster than your AI agent". Time will tell if LLMs are the new Hadoop.

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

After all, unlike LLMs and agentic AI, command-line tools are deterministic and don't hallucinate more than Timothy Leary ever did.

You don't know how to use AI

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