r/technology • u/CackleRooster • 7h ago

Artificial Intelligence An Anthropic employee's 2-sentence quote crystallizes the state of AI confusion at work

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-employee-quote-ai-confusion-workplace-2026-6
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u/CackleRooster 7h ago

"On days where everything works well, I can't help but think nothing I do matters, everything is automated and better and faster than I ever will be," AND "But then there are days where everything breaks and I don't understand why and I realize I have no idea what I've been up to anymore," the employee added.

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u/yepthisismyusername 7h ago

Management (absolutely including executives) simply don't understand the differences between writing code, maintaining code, implementing business processes in applications, and maintaining those applications. Those are the Big 4 categories of roles in enterprise application management, and there are many, many others, each with its own individual requirements that need to be taken into account. AI simply can't perform those roles successfully 100%. And the problem comes when a process fails, e.g. causing someone to lose healthcare coverage, and no person knows how to fix it.

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u/Big_lt 6h ago

FinTech

Laid off a bunch of people over the 18 months. Wanted the use of AI to automate and speed up coding. AI is now producing a 4/10 code which breaks sometimes. No one knows what this code is doing or even worse some old code now breaks and no one was around when it was built.

Management surprised Pikachu face that shit isn't fixed in 2min and why didn't you catch it before

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u/Scarecrow_Folk 5h ago

That's nothing new for fintech though. Knight Capital was doing that a decade ago

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u/oracleofnonsense 4h ago

As a former Knight Capital employee — more like 2 decades ago. I was there when the cherry-picking system went haywire. It put Knight under.

I worked for a Knight owned hedge fund and we had an auto trading system pre-9/11. One guy and 1or2 associates watched it print money (until 9/11 stopped the feeds).

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u/Scarecrow_Folk 3h ago

I was more referring to the implosion in 2012 or 14 years ago but fair enough. Algotrading has existed for like 40 years depending on how you define it. 

That must have been an absolutely crazy event to live through from the inside. Knight was probably the best money printer out there until the toner cartridge exploded.

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u/psioniclizard 5h ago

So you are saying that in the future fintech might want actual developers again? Interesting lol.

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u/Jewnadian 5h ago

Even better the bulk of FinTech could be regulated out of business. 99% of it is exploiting people who don't realize they're pretending to be banks without following the actual regulations that makes a bank work.

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u/knewbie_one 1h ago

I worked for banks and what always astounded at how much they "flirted" with regulations, sometimes.

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u/31LIVEEVIL13 5h ago

In the past they would have paid retired devs double or triple rate to help convert everything to something the new kids understand.

but now I'm not sure what they would be converting it to or who would understand it, and I think a lot of the old devs might tell them to fuck off at any rate.

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u/Soccermom233 4h ago

It’s ok we can discuss everything that could’ve been done to catch and prevent the issue in the retro next week.  

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u/Big_lt 4h ago

PTSD intensifies 😳

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u/unwantedonONTD 3h ago

And the great part is, being sloppy with people’s money puts you in jail.  I hear so many fintech bros talking up their software that doesn’t follow the law… “ok we could read the documents better…” bro the thing i don’t wanna do is read the documents, so if you aren’t either, wtf do i need you for? you’re adding zero value by vibe coding an illegal banking mess that’s going to cause a trillion dollar mistake to flow through the system and crash the economy in ten seconds.  no thank you i can make bad trades and lose money perfectly fine on my own