Techbros didn't even invent that shit.

That and "disruption" was just going into an existing market, flooding it quickly with cheap prices, and the second you squeeze out competition jack up rates.

It's the same thing Walmart did.

With AI they offer it cheaper than humans because they're burning investor cash and not making money. Once a company fires staff, their next AI contract switches to per token price instead of monthly unlimited.

And then suddenly realizing the "rockstars" that kept their job because they were AI experts, were just sitting at their laptop 8 hours straight constantly prompting over and over again. After that they're paying more than they were before AI with a shittier product and completely unpredictable workflow completely reliant on AI usage.

Hopefully we're reaching the point even c-suite execs figure it out. Once they do it'll pop.

You’re saying I can help destroy Facebook by using it?

And by all indications LLMs will never be there - its speed of progression towards that has already pretty much ground to halt.

Mind you, you're totally right that they will replace everyone if they can (i.e. if they get their hands on actual AGI), it's just that this tech direction is a dead end and won't get there.

I enjoy working towards finding ways of making AI more helpful, and that's part of my job at work. Unfortunately, it feels like I'm constantly at war with everyone over the most effective way to do it. Management is looking to get 3x, 5x, 10x productivity boosts out of it. We've got AI reading the technical docs (which are partly generated by AI), requirements, and acceptance criteria, generating stories, implementing stories, and checking itself.

And then I'm supposed to review the output to see if the code looks good. Well shit, the code looks good, but I don't really know what the fuck was attempted. Like the documentation is hard reading, and I have to evaluate 13 classes of new code and tests. And every line of it looks like good code. I might as well be reviewing code for my bank — I don't know exactly what it's supposed to be doing or the constraints or business reasons, but the code looks clean and well structured and written to good standards.

I'm trying to find the language to communicate to folks the right way to think about this. I've landed on this: Code is the most expressive version of telling a computer what to do. When you use natural language, there are necessarily ambiguities about what we are wanting to tell the computer — ambiguities which require interpretation.

So when you read AI written code, you aren't just reading AI implemented code (which is actually well written for what it is), but that implementation is based on an AI making tens or hundreds of tiny decisions you don't see about what you mean to be done. The code hangs together based on the decisions that were made — decisions that are opaque and unquestioned; questions that undoubtedly would've led to deep thinking and discussion with the team if I knew about them.

Anyway there's this mindset in business: people are resources. They are means of turning requirements into code at a certain rate. I think this leads to the idea that individual expressions of thought or opinion are not valuable or are in fact even harmful. But these micro-decisions about what intent is and how to express it in code are where the magic happens. And without taking the time to think about those decisions, what am I evaluating code on?

It looks pretty and it compiles and it does what it set out to do in the story. And then I think you find it elegantly solved the wrong problems while ignoring things that really matter — things that aren't expressed in code.

Shit. I ranted back rather than just making a little comment but it can be hard not to have an outlet at work to share these ideas because I can't express too much disagreement with leadership lest I be seen as not a team player. Like I want to find ways to leverage AI for the most benefit and the least cost because it's a hard puzzle to solve and I love solving such puzzles, but management comes along with MOAR AI! It doesn't scale that way fuckheads! Now fuck off and let me see if I can bump productivity gains from 20% to maybe get another 5%. It's not sexy but it's real unlike your vibe-coded monstrosity.

I think I might have gone from rant to Ted Talk.

Who cares if it gets it right 99% of the time? Who cares if the next model is 99.9%? It’s not 100%! That means it’s a ticking clock until something major fucks up!

This is a really weak argument. Getting right 99.9% of the time is extraordinarily good in many fields, superhuman even. The human brain is also a non-deterministic system. Surgeons make mistakes too, there is no such a thing as a 100% reliable human.