I'm Sick of Reading About AI

More than AI itself, I'm annoyed by AI company executives who puff themselves up and insist that AGI is right around the corner, that they're about to replace all programmers, support staff, and the rest of those useless money-eaters doing their pseudo-intellectual work — which obviously amounts to nothing more than generating text. How these villains posture and insist they're solving humanity-scale problems! When in reality, the only problems they've ever solved are filling their own pockets.

Even more than executives, I'm annoyed by colleagues who puff up and say they've mastered the art of prompting, and are now 10x programmers — because instead of doing tasks themselves, they spin up five or six agents that write code better than they do.

First of all, guys: if agents really do write better code than you — I have bad news. You fundamentally failed your education and your development as a professional. I have not heard a single colleague I'd consider a strong developer claim that AI writes better code than them (I won't even add a qualifier for women — you already know how many there are among coders: still vanishingly few).

Everyone says roughly the same thing: sure, it simplifies things significantly in some cases, it's an excellent tool for "intellectual copy-paste" when there's a pattern to repeat with small, clearly defined differences; yes, it's a good tool for code that doesn't need to be maintained — like internal tools that, if they break, can be thrown out and rewritten in a single session. All of that is true.

But tasks that require any actual thinking — it's always faster to write them yourself than to wrestle with prompting and go around in circles of "yes, you're right! I'll fix it the way you said" — while breaking three other things in the process.

In short, those buffoons who slap the "AI enthusiast" label on themselves and call company-wide meetings to explain how to write rules in an .md file, or talk about some other nonsense like spec-driven development — those people are incredibly annoying. They generate kilotons of mediocre code that workers who still know how to build a mental model of a project in their heads will then have to clean up.

Even more annoying than those clowns are managers who understand absolutely nothing but are convinced that an agent is basically like a junior programmer. No it's not! A junior developer, if they're not an idiot, will one day become a senior — and even as a junior they can ask a senior a question when something isn't clear. AI can only say "you're absolutely right!" and then cook up something even worse.

Managers want everyone to use AI ("it's like the internet, it's here to stay"), because no one wants to be the person who goes against company policy. This isn't even really about managers — they've always been the most extreme conformists, otherwise they don't last long. No one dares have their own opinion, let alone speak up about the fact that maybe this AI of yours isn't so great after all. Tasks aren't getting done faster, quality is somehow dropping, fixes are taking longer (remember the retreat from building a mental model in your head in the hope that AI will hold it for us).

Try, as a manager at a company where the executives have AI hype dripping from their ears, to say something against AI — you'll immediately face ostracism.

Executives who've been sold AI also annoy me. These summer children are convinced that any day now they'll toss half their staff (or three-quarters) out into the cold, and AI will do everything while the "meat" orchestrates it. The payroll savings — incredible! So much bonus to pocket. And so it goes (and already is going!). People out in the cold — bonus in the pocket, everything flows in one direction — hire people again, but only those who use AI, we can't waste all that money we're paying for AI provider credits.

Government officials also annoy me: they've been fed the same hype as the executives, told that we're on the verge of AGI and whoever finds it first will pull ahead of everyone, the economy will bloom and smell wonderful (swamps bloom and smell too, not just flowers). Because of this, vast amounts of taxpayer money from honest workers are being poured into constructing data centers nobody needs — while the officials themselves think they're doing something even more glorious than the first moon landing, competing with each other, when in reality the competition is about who can burn more taxpayer money to enrich the clever people from existing Big Tech (and themselves, obviously).

There's no conclusion. The conclusion is that most people understand nothing about anything, and only pretend otherwise. Some are inflating a bubble, signing contracts with each other in a circle; others puff up their chests and write nonsense online — especially on LinkedIn, which is such a hotbed of self-aggrandizing cringe that it makes you feel physically ill; a third group listens to the first two, makes a mess themselves, forces others to do the same, ruins their own products. A dark picture, all in all.