A.I. apps and tools have completely changed the way I work. I get tasks done faster, but I also learn at a slower rate. And my company’s A.I. usage requirements infuriate me. 

For over a year, my employer tracked my daily A.I. usage, a policy that was pushed in the name of “innovation.” The A.I. tools provided by my company were poor and changed every week. When asked a reasonable question: “What if we find or make a better A.I. tool for our job that isn’t part of your tracked system?” Management replied: “We won’t be able to count you as using A.I.” This was their version of innovation, I guess. 

For a week, I seriously dedicated myself to adopting A.I. and climbing the “A.I. leaderboard,” a running system that measured how much each employee used A.I. The more you prompted the A.I. with queries like “write unit tests for my new feature” or “summarize how this file is used,” for example, the higher you ranked. The company was essentially measuring a word count, not assessing whether engineers were using the provided A.I. tools effectively or productively. I rose up the leaderboard by writing a simple Python script that would repeatedly ask my A.I. assistant the same question over and over: “What is the difference between Python 2 and 3? Be as verbose as possible.” My manager noticed my “usage numbers” and thanked me for embracing the new A.I. apps that had been introduced. I later discovered, through a Financial Times article, that I wasn’t alone in my strategy: many other engineers were doing the same thing, much more aggressively, for much longer. Eventually, my company shut down the leaderboard. I’m pretty sure they still track our A.I. usage anyway. 

Now, I start every workday the same way: by asking my A.I. assistant, “How’s the weather today?” This guarantees I’ll be seen as compliant.