Really says something about the HN crowd that you're getting downvoted for this.

I'd give them to AI because they're generally just not getting done. I worked hard to get that frontend dev time to make those improvements, but there was no chance it was ever going to be enough. When you're talking about enterprise software, minor improvements to pageload speed do not move the needle on revenue. When you have a list of features that customers will actually pay for, those will get priority 100% of the time.

Everybody's job is to serve the company priorities. Engineers don't get to pick the tasks they want to do because they're getting paid to be there. I also have spent lots of time doing things I'd rather not do, because that's the nature of a job (plus a pile of stock options incentivizes me).

Better to have those tasks done by AI than not at all.

Thankfully my career has been at very early stage startups, so none of that applies!

As a PM I have never not had a backlog of little stuff we'd love to do but can't justify prioritizing. I've also almost always had developers who want to make improvements to the codebase that don't get prioritized because we need new features.

The upside is that both of these things are the kind of tasks that are probably good to give to AI. I've always got little UI bugs that bother me every time I use our application but don't actually break anything and thus won't impact revenue and never get done.

I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.

Both of those cases feel like places where AI probably gets the job done.

Good for her - I'm just astounded that I didn't know any of this. Even the fact that generics only have to be within something like 20% of the active ingredient of the non-generic was surprising to me; I thought they were basically identical.

But the quality of manufacturing stuff is just unbelievable. You take for granted that our medications are highly regulated and it turns out to not be remotely true...