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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/grauenwolf on 2025-08-30 16:52:26+00:00.

Like so many others, my company bought heavily into the whole AI First thing. We’re so committed to it that we’re under bidding projects with the hope that AI will save so much on labor that we’ll still turn a profit.

Needless to say, this means pushing everyone into using AI as heavily as possible, even to the point where we’re supposed to use AI instead of web searches. And as a programmer, I do a lot of web searching. You’d be forgiven if you thought I regularly do the same kinds of things day in and day out. But if I have to do something more than once, I stick it in a code library and just reuse that. So most of the real work involves a lot of research. It’s a rare day that I spend more time typing than reading.

For programmers, AI is built into our tools. The idea is that you want the AI to have as much context as possible. And by including it in the tools, it will automatically upload all of my open tabs into the AI engine along with my question.

But here’s the thing I didn’t realize at first. One of those tabs is an 82 MB code file containing all of the instructions to build a database from scratch. So with each question it is uploading that whole file to Microsoft’s AI servers. And those servers have to crunch through the file before even starting on my question. Which explains why I have to wait 6 minutes before the AI gives me to the wrong answer instead of 1 second for Google to give me a different wrong answer.

I’d love to tell you about the fallout. About how the company freaked out when they learned how many AI tokens I was burning through. But this is just increasing my “engagement” so the only immediate effect is that I stop getting “you aren’t using AI enough” emails.

Oh, and don’t worry about my project being late because of this. The bottleneck is, as always, waiting on the customer to decide what they want. So I’m still spending most of my day reading books and wasting time on Reddit.