I'm Sick of Reading About AI

More than AI itself, what infuriates me are the AI company executives who puff out their chests and insist that AGI is just around the corner, that any minute now they'll replace all programmers, support staff, and other useless consumers of money whose pseudo-intellectual labor obviously boils down to generating text. The nerve of these people, posturing as if they're solving problems on the scale of all humanity! When in reality, the only problem they've ever solved is lining their own pockets.

More than the executives, the only thing that infuriates me more are colleagues who puff out their chests and say they've mastered the art of prompting, and now they're 10x programmers because instead of doing tasks themselves, they spin up half a dozen agents that write code better than they can.

First of all, guys — if agents truly write code better than you, I have bad news. You've fundamentally botched your education and professional development somewhere along the way. I haven't heard a single colleague I'd consider a strong developer say that AI writes code better than they do.

They all say roughly the same thing: sure, it simplifies certain things a lot, it's an excellent tool for intellectual copy-paste when there's a pattern that needs to be repeated with small, clearly defined differences; yes, it's a good tool for code that doesn't need to be maintained — like internal tools that can be thrown away and rewritten in a single session if they break. All true.

But for tasks that require even a bit of actual thinking — it's faster to write it yourself than to mess around with prompting and go in circles of "Yes, you're right! I'll do exactly what you said" — while simultaneously breaking three other things in the process.

In short, these goofballs who slap the "AI enthusiast" label on themselves and organize company meetings to talk about how to write rules in an md file or some other nonsense like spec-driven development — they're insufferable beyond measure. They generate kilotons of mediocre code that the real workers, who haven't yet lost the ability to build a mental model of the project in their heads, will have to clean up later.

More than these clowns, the only thing worse are managers who understand absolutely nothing but are convinced that an agent is like a junior programmer. No, it's not! A junior, if they're not an idiot, will eventually become a senior, and even as a junior, they can ask a senior a question when something is unclear. AI can only say "Absolutely, you're right!" — and stir up an even bigger mess.

Managers want everyone to use AI ("because it's like the internet, it's here to stay") because nobody wants to be the one who goes against party policy. This isn't even about managers specifically — they're always the most rabid conformists, otherwise they don't last long. Nobody dares have their own opinion, let alone speak up about the possibility that maybe this AI of yours isn't all that great. And tasks aren't getting solved that much faster, and quality is somehow declining, and fixes take longer (remember the bit about abandoning mental model building in hopes that AI will hold it for us).

Try being a manager in a company where the executives have AI noodles hanging from their ears and say something against AI — you'll be immediately subjected to ostracism.

The executives who bought into AI are infuriating too. These summer children are convinced that any day now they'll toss half the staff (or maybe three-quarters) out into the cold, and AI will do everything while the "meat" people orchestrate it. The salary savings — incredible! Think of the bonuses they can pocket. And that's exactly what's happening (and already has!). People out the door — bonus in the pocket, everything goes south — hire people again, but only ones who use AI, because why else are we paying so much in AI provider credits?

Government officials are infuriating too: they've had the same AI noodles hung on their ears about how we're on the verge of AGI, and whoever finds it first will leave everyone in the dust, and the economy will bloom and smell wonderful (swamps also bloom and smell, by the way, not just flowers). Because of this, heaps of honest workers' tax money get dumped into building data centers nobody needs, while the officials themselves think they're competing on something even bigger than the first Moon landing, when in reality the competition is about who can burn more taxpayer money to enrich the schemers of existing Big Tech (and themselves, naturally).

There won't be a conclusion. The conclusion is that most people don't understand a damn thing about anything, they just pretend. Some are inflating the bubble, signing contracts in circles with each other; others are puffing out their chests and writing nonsense on the internet, especially on LinkedIn — that place is such a breeding ground of self-congratulatory cringe it makes you sick; the third group listens to the first two, does stupid things themselves and forces others to do the same, ruins their own products. It's bleak, all around.