Guess my career has gone such that I've always looked to code and git history to wrap my head around, because the documentation people write is unreliable.
Particularly in enterprise, where for some reason there's some "developer" who writes a word document and then buggers off while someone else actually does the coding and the relationship between actual code and document drift because the "architect" never had to reconcile his document with the realities.
Problem being that most of the people calling the shots can't tell the difference between slop and good work even before AI.
If it is any consolation, in my experience no one will ever read the system architecture document anyway. So if it's totally wrong, no one will know.
When it comes to my actual core work and getting things done, I'm still content. Even with the pressure to "use AI", it's usefulness is limited enough in my specific niche that I actually still do most of it. There are a couple of more mainstream components that it did accelerate, but the core of my job it kind of just isn't good at. I still have authority over it and how it is done, and I can keep it pretty solid.
However the phenonomenon of people telling me how I should be doing my work who know absolutely zero about my work is exhausting. Someone who has never written code or used any version control, even with AI for some reason is telling me I should stop using git because it isn't AI friendly because he read some article and he thinks it sounds smart to say it. Someone telling me they vibed up a solution for something and sent it out to our customers and then I get stuck trying to repair the customer relationship when it is crap, and expectations are that I should be able to fix it real quick because "the AI did all the hard stuff already". So much harder fixing slop from someone that vibed without knowing than starting from scratch, but no one believes it because it almost looks right and how far off can it really be of it looks that right?
Most days I avoid that and I do feel like it's getting better as the novelty wears off and these people with no stake in things are getting bored of slopping up stuff they find out they don't actually care about, so it is fine.
However, I would absolutely suggest not trying to get into this industry. It is an absolute shit show to onboard into now. I am so glad now that my kid had zero interest in this stuff, saved them a bunch of disappointment.
My family got stuck with one. It couldn't get the order right, kept doubling an item. Finally my kid asked for 10,000 waters and that caused the human to get tagged in.
Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.
Seems more narrow than that. If your "AI" just copies the input almost verbatim, then it's not "transformative".
Unfortunately they still seem to regard the big players' consumption as "transformative" enough to not count.
Self-checkout was a boon because reduced wages to process customers (in theory).
Now they have an even better mechanism to push: delivery and pickup. Keep the customers away from the merchandise except what they have already paid for. Wal-Mart pushing the promise of free delivery under 22 minutes when I go to check if they have something in-store.
It wasn't about the cashier, it was about the line.
Before self checkout, the wal mart near me would on a typical day have 3 or 4 cashiers working. At the height of their adoption, they had 28 self checkouts typically up.
But now, they have 2-3 self checkouts open and a big line, while you can generally find one of the handful of cashiers with no one waiting. It baffles me that people would wait to self-checkout when there's a cashier open with no line, unless people have just that much social anxiety (a wal mart seems a tricky proposition) or else people are liking their chances for skipping scan of an item here or there.
I think you may be right, but anecdote in favor of a pull out:
At my area wal mart, it got to a pretty nice point, about 28 operating self checkout lines. Never had a line, they had disabled the bagging scales and disabled the voice.
Now, they usually have 5 reserved for Walmart plus people, and 2 to 3 running with a longer line than a human cashier. Then a line att the door as they want to audit everyone's receipts. It's an obnoxious experience, and reportedly they still have more theft than they would like.
However, they are pushing than I can get my orders delivered within 22 minutes, or pickup. Think they are pushing people to the theft proof options where you don't get anywhere near the merchandise that you haven't already paid for.
AI, yes.
Once got flagged for theft because the camera saw me put a box down on the far side of the scanner and then used the handheld scanner because it was large. Evidently the box getting past the fixed scanner without scanning triggers theft even if you scan it.
In a convenience store, I put products on a platform and I don't have to scan barcode and it just "scans" my whole order all at once with machine vision. It worked well for me, but seems to have the clerk on high alert to watch it like a hawk from any mistakes, which sounds exhausting. I got the sense that it screws up a lot and the clerk is on the hook for it.
In short, you choose getting laid.
It's kind of weird because it kind of acts like 80/20, but you end up doing a significant effort to unwind things back to 60/40 to start trying to massage it to what you really need.
Assuming it's one of the areas where it does relatively strongly, other areas it will flounder far worse and for some scenarios it can essentially one shot a working thing, if it is really a supremely common and simple thing.