AI Tools Let Nontechnical Staff Build Complex Dashboards, Burdening Engineers

semantic layer + mcp would solve 90% of these problems. if only i had time to build this instead of debugging slop code

@generativist i'm honestly just making a new dash rather than checking the code, its faster

@arcgustine nope fr im owned

@eigenrobot the fun part is after you spend your time verifying they were or fixing them so they are, you get to have the fun "okay but however this is actually useless and you shouldn't be making decisions based on this" discussion

@eigenrobot Being implicitly demoted to what functionally amounts to covering-my-ass insurance to launder minimal effort of others may be one of the lowlights of my career in software

@eigenrobot Unfortunately

@eigenrobot this is the cost of free code generation. once non-technical people can ship, you need automated verification or you're QA for the whole team.

@eigenrobot We are all going to get frank grimes'd

@eigenrobot At some point, you chat with your manager and say that you're building that thing for 2-3 days though.

@eigenrobot wtf

@eigenrobot Wait, you can't just tell people, "We're excited for your new horizons, but IT lacks the resources to support spontaneous user projects that didn't go through TIPS"?

@eigenrobot echoes of telling my not-even-nontechnical colleague what “test coverage” was and the merits of using `go test` instead of one enormous python script

for what should’ve been a microscopic wrapper around an existing battle-tested tool in the first place, not a new app

@eigenrobot AI is the new Excel

nontechnical users creating mountains of insane garbage to drive decisions with enormous financial and legal ramifications that nobody understands

@eigenrobot Man goes to the doctor, has business data he needs to understand. “Use AI, just have someone QA it.” “But doctor…”

@eigenrobot I used to be able to figure out “this guy is totally lost” in just 1 sentence. Now I have to read 3 paragraphs and 2 bulleted lists to reach the same conclusion.

@eigenrobot Now you know how we spreadsheet people felt like

@eigenrobot It really makes you think less of people doesn’t it

@eigenrobot Tell them to ask Claude

same thing but with writing people send me drafts of “technical writing” 2 confirm they r accurate that they wrote with AI. I re write it correctly. Then they send back to me again a new version they rewrote of my writing with AI and gotta do it all over again cuz it didn’t track changes correctly etc

Honestly not that hard just stupid when it involves numbers and I don’t want any mistakes

@eigenrobot Just say no. Or charge them.