After seeing a crazy amount of non-programmers, sometimes with 10 years of experience, basically turning off their brains and offloading most their thinking to some LLM and turning their days into "please check this product and tell me what I should do next", I don't see why not.
I've seen: designers, performance marketers, data scientists, SEO experts, product managers, engineering managers, CRM expert, all using it for pretty much every single individual part of their job. I don't have to even mention programmers, of course.
Once in a while the most egregious ones get caught. I've seen so far a product manager, three data scientists, a CRM person and several developers getting fired for doing absolutely nothing but showing up, firing Claude with a few integrations to a dozen tools and prompting "do the work".
Might sound harsh, but after the last few years, I really don't see why an LLM wouldn't do a better job by itself compared to 80% of employees of tech companies, honestly.
To answer the sibling that is flagged. I vouched but it’s still grey.
These people were fired because their work was considered shit by their managers and produced no results. They were replaced by nobody. They were dead weight pretending to work.
EDIT: I think this sounds quite similar to tales of developers and Excel wizards automating their jobs in secret and producing the same results. This was not the case here, as the results were considered low quality.
Isn't that .. what people were told to do? To use AI for as much of their job as possible?
This is absolutely true, but even the most charitable interpretation of “maximize the use of AI” doesn’t include “do nothing but prompt and you’ll keep your job”.
One can argue semantics and fairness all day long, but if an employee is adding no value to their $90 Claude signature, then they’re gonna get fired as soon as someone realizes. :/
One of the biggest traps LLMs enable is the fantasy of getting away with it. Tools that make you feel like you can get away with it bring out the worst in people. It's not a reflection of the technology but of the people.
Every time we see another AI agent "gone rogue", every time we see more LLM slop turning up by e-mail, comments, blog articles, people did that. Not AI -- people feel like they can get away with it. People are setting the machines out to do these things. We should be addressing the people, not the machines. The machines are the symptom.
Every time people manage to get away with something, it's insane, it's addictive. It's all over once you get caught, but until then, maybe forever, LLMs can feel like a cheat code...
Reminds me of the early internet, the whole declaration of cyberspace thing, the fantasy of information freedom.
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