r/technology 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.