Talking with an eng director about how to get new engineers up to speed. They use AI powered docs search now, like everybody
He wants the AI to respond well to “how do I learn about infrastructure at Initech”
Would new engineers ever ask that? In my experience new engineers try to do stuff, fail, then ask random questions trying to get unstuck. But I am from a different era. Would a Gen Z engineer actually ask such a general question?
AI agents are designed for servility. Can they notice you’re asking a lot of what we used to call XY questions and gently tell you to RTFM?
(Amazingly someone has made a whole site about this)
I’m being serious here. This is a big gap between talking with humans and bots. The bot values its time at zero, as perhaps it should? But that can delay your learning
@neilk My company makes an AI automation tool that does Tier 1 alert triage. We realized that this will impact how junior analysts learn, so we developed a free Chrome extension that also uses AI to help people develop investigative thinking skills. It's not giving answers, but helping people to follow proven methodologies.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/coach-by-dropzone-ai/cgihclihdemfnlgblnkebdadfponoigo
@neilk "What are you trying to do with the answer to question X? Oh? You want to do Y? You should take a look HERE and see if you have a different question, once you have the context."
(XKCD's take is pretty funny, but closer to a satire of getting nerd sniped by Question X by failing to reflect on the context of "can you pass the salt"?" explodes from routine ops into condiment workflow design).
Neil Kandalgaonkar
Tyson, Chicken Rancher 🐓
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)