Timely post for me. My employer has decided to “standardize on Copilot” (after previously telling us to use Gemini but never getting us the wherewithal to actually utilize the corporate Gemini license they’d established; don’t ask me to make it make sense) and it’s possible they’ll soon start requiring us to use Copilot. I expressed to a coworker that "maybe there’s something that’s technically under the “Copilot” brand that is much less invasive and bullshit that we can use so we can say we’re “using Copilot” in a “malicious compliance” kind of way but not actually have to… you know, use an LLM for anything that’s going to fuck up our regular work. Like, maybe I can use the Copilot Outlook integration to send myself emails that I can somewhat plausibly claim to be reminders to myself. Following the letter, but not the spirit, of the “law”. Maybe I can even automate it. Whatever the case, if I was to do such a thing, this graphic could be a useful resource. Though for now, we haven’t yet gotten any mandate to “use Copilot.”

We did something similar years ago. We were told we “had to use Spring” for a Java project we were building from scratch. So we used a tiny little piece of the Spring ecosystem of libraries. The Spring context, mostly. And some of the facilities that would scan for @Configuration classes. (Though we limited the packages it scanned pretty strictly.) Just so we could say “see, we used Spring”. But we used nothing but that. Most notably, we didn’t use Spring controllers or the DispatcherServlet. And even the parts of Spring that we did use, we only let certain portions of our codebase depend on Spring at all, just to limit how much contact our code even had with Spring.

How are they tracking your use of AI and why is it mandatory?

and why is it mandatory?

Some companies’ C-suites have gotten their heads so far up their asses on AI that they’ve entirely forgotten about making money and the only metric they care about now is whether their company is using AI more than their competitors.

It’s no longer about ‘how do we use AI to make money?’ – it’s about ‘how can we spend money to increase AI usage?’

LLM seem magic if you don’t have expertise in an area. Middle management and above don’t have any technical expertise in their domain do they love the 40% (a bit worse than the 80-20 rule) that LLM enable.

Report: “Project is delayed because we are fixing a deadlock issue” Mgmt to LLM: “My project is delayed because of deadlock issue. What should I do?” LLM: “Oxidise your codebase and use Rust” Mgmt to team: “We should stop writing in C++ and use Rust 100%” Le Team has no rust experience and a 15 year old codebase in C++