Ben Steele

Belfast born, proud father and husband to @noelleregan, living in Connemara |
Platforms & Serverless |
Snr Dir Architecture @LibertyMutual |
Opinions are my own

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

I talk to engineers at other companies every day and hear the same thing: one person is 10x'ing their output with Claude but the rest of the org hasn't caught up.

Watching teams adopt AI, I keep seeing the same 4 steps.

I mapped them out here: Steps of AI Adoption https://t.co/kQnRAUMKpP

[The Rundown AI @TheRundownAI]

AGI has been achieved in Ireland.

Artificial Guinness Intelligence.

Engineer Matt Cortland built an AI voice agent named Rachel, gave her a Northern Irish accent, and pointed her at every pub in the country.

Over St. Paddy's weekend, she rang 3,000+ of them to ask one question: how much for a pint of Guinness?

How he built it: ElevenLabs for the voice, Twilio and an old Irish SIM to place the calls, Google Places API to map 5,200+ pubs across all 32 counties, and Claude to parse the transcripts for prices.

2,052 picked up. Barely any even realized she was AI. The whole operation ran him about €200.

The result is a live price index he's calling the Guinndex.

Ireland's statistics office used to track pint prices, but stopped in 2011.

An engineer with a weekend and a voice agent just picked up where they left off.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[RTÉ Sport @RTEsport]

Newly-crowned world champion Fiona Murtagh is lost for words after her incredible performance in Shanghai
Race report 👉https://t.co/1szcR03e5y

[Regans Moycullen @RegansMoycullen]

Senior Football Preliminary Quarter Finals Draw 🏐

St James V Killanin
Leitir mor V Dunmore
Tuam Stars V Mountbellow Moylough
Oughterard V Milltown

[Regans Moycullen @RegansMoycullen]

Pints, camogie and silage… Brighid McLaughlins column in the Sunday Independent 🗞️

[Ben Steele @belfast_nerd]

Well done Fiona Murtagh 👏👏👏👏

[World Rowing @WorldRowing]

🚩 A-FINAL - Women’s Pair (W2-)

🥇 Ymkje Clevering (b), Veronique Meester (s), Netherlands 🇳🇱
🥈 Fiona Murtagh (b), Aifric Keogh (s), Ireland 🇮🇪
🥉 Hedvig Rasmussen (b), Fie Udby Erichsen (s), Denmark 🇩🇰

#WorldRowingCup #WRCVarese

[Ben Steele @belfast_nerd]

Super excited @mulleryj to meet the teams and where this engagement can go with @GalwayIdeasLab @Liberty_IT

[Matthew Jones @stumpy_juk]

Our annual fancy dress pub crawl was yesterday.... One of the best. @tobytarrant @Vinay_K_Joshi @domisatwit @Pipskin @ChrisMoyles @RadioX

[Hope4Liam @Hope4Liam_ie]

The community of Maigh Cuilinn is rallying around Liam Davoren as he recovers from a life-altering accident. Through #Hope4Liam, the community is showing its support for Liam and his family.
For more about #Hope4Liam and how you can support Liam, visit https://t.co/ctEmc9gOby

[Ben Steele @belfast_nerd]

@Xbox What about Europe @Xbox ?

[Everton @Everton]

UP THE FANTASTIC TOFFEES!!! ✊

[Greg Murphy 🤓 @TheGregMurphy]

This Christmas ad for a pub in Enniskillen is better than anything John Lewis has ever put out

[Ben Steele @belfast_nerd]

Class act, well done @DavidWy08468671 and team

[David Wynne @DavidWy08468671]

Thanks for all the support as always @maighcuilinn!! Not to be this year. Congrats to @CorofinGAA.

[Liberty IT @Liberty_IT]

Yesterday our Pride and Women in Tech groups hosted a virtual fireside chat with the amazing Colonel Dame Kelly Holmes- what an inspiration she is 🌟

She challenged us to think about how we motivate ourselves - what are your top goal-setting tips!

[Kent Beck 🌻 @KentBeck]

Given the cost of blocking, asynchronous code reviews, I'm surprised more teams haven't experimented with eliminating them.

What bad things would happen if you just integrated changes? Are those bad things happening already? What else could you do to avoid those problems?

[Martin Fowler @martinfowler]

NEW POST

While coding assistants like Copilot can improve speed and flow, they can also disrupt it. Birgitta Böckeler looks at two ways in which they can get in the way: amplifying bad or outdated practices, and review fatigue.

https://t.co/UerXbksAqh?

[Ben Steele @belfast_nerd]

@JemmaSimpsonIT @brianwcraig @Liberty_IT @NIDevConf Awesome @brianwcraig and @KarlKyck 👍👍👍

[Brian W Craig @brianwcraig]

There is only one Karl Kyck. A passionate man when it comes to testing excellence
@Liberty_IT @NIDevConf

[Liberty IT @Liberty_IT]

Calling students in Galway!

Mark your calendars for a fun-filled afternoon of entertainment and pizza, where we'll share a little bit more about what sets us apart! 🍕

📆 Fri 20 Oct
⏰ 2:00 - 4:00 pm
📍 PorterShed a Dó, Market Street

Get your ticket: https://t.co/0T7dwOLNfF