Mastodawn

Loving this: "The Copilot Delusion"

Quotes:
"Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, "Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it's good code. Let’s deploy it." Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down."

"The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays."

"At that point, you’re not working with a copilot. You’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded dependency graph."

"But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity."

https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

Robert Kist 🇦🇹🇸🇬May 23

@tante in MS's case respect for the user left the building long before AI made its entrance (thank you, dear shareholders!)... or does anyone feel respected by Windows showing ads and blasting all that "telemetry" towards Redmond?

enoch_exe_inc May 23

@kwramm @tante Their utter abandonment of Visual Basic Classic in favour of .NET put a dent in my respect for them. And that occurred before I was even born. I had just learned VB6 as a kid and was disappointed to learn in 2011 that it was no longer supported.

Patrick Morris Miller May 23

@kwramm @tante When did Microsoft *ever* respect the user?

Alexander Dyas May 23

“Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring.”

Stop caring.

Ask your self - Why did you get into this type of work in the first place?

Michael Simons May 23

@tante I second that and the author already had me at the reference to an Uncle Bob.

@tante "And he did this with everyone. A one-man bug factory. Whispering half-formed solutions into the ears of juniors like a sick, twisted full-stack Rasputin." *chef's kiss*

@tante And entire school districts have bought into and are forcing this rancid garbage on all of their employees and students. #DumbAsDirt

TTurbo 🇨🇦May 23

@tante
Eyes wide open

Until we unleash the Kraken

Stephan Kurz May 23

> Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.

Steve Hersey May 23

@tante
When that "co-worker" shows up in my coding tools, it is met with the metaphorical equivalent of a 12-bore loaded with buckshot.

If you work in a place where manglement insists on using this BS, and cannot be persuaded otherwise, I advise you to quietly pack your parachute and LEAVE, because they're going to have disasters, and you don't want any of it sticking to you.

Even if all I need is a crummy use-once-and-discard piece of code, I'll write it by hand, thanks all the same. I can FIND and FIX mistakes made at the speed of me; mistakes coded at the speed of AI are far more dangerous.

zombiecide May 23

@tante "When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning."

That's exactly it

Christoffer S.May 23

@tante Possibly one of the best articles I've read in a very long time. This is beautiful. This is wordsmithing like I've not read in a long while... thanks for sharing!

Eliot Lash May 23

@tante I enjoyed this read, thanks for sharing. I feel like I'm never going to really get a handle on the extreme optimization stuff that the author implies would make me a "real programmer" or whatever (CPUs are fast enough that I prefer to focus on correctness, soundness, and maintainability in my code rather than performance in 95% of cases) but I think otherwise this represents my feelings about using AI coding assistants pretty well.

Working Class Games May 23

@tante "The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They'll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid."

so good

Tanquist May 23

@tante
This is the perfect companion to The AI Con, which I've just started listening to.

Toni Aittoniemi May 23

For some reason we have a world full of people who think automating people’s personal development is a great idea.

What in the loving earth is this madness about??

In some ways I think it’s about losing sight of what is love & what is beauty and how that meshes together with performance & awesome.

Andrija Petrovic May 23

@tante Been there, done that, share the same feeling. But it was a great experience, and I'm still in contact with #AI. Our relationship evolves rather quickly over the last 6 months or so since it started, with downs and ups and downs and downs and...

@tante
So well written! Elegant.
"This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress."
So true - among doers but especially among leadership..

Martin Seeger May 24

@tante Missed opportunity for a nice rhetorical figure:

Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and all you can do there is pray that it works.

the copilot delusion creates unsustainable software

"The copilot delusion" is about the necessity of using your brain when programming. Stop wasting energy with shitty code. Todays temptation is to only rely on #AI assistants like GitHub CoPilot, who firmly copy the first answer from StackOverflow, believing it is the best for you. A get code that is barely working which may fix the ticket in this sprint while enshittificating the codebase. @tante and @bobschi - thanks for sharing! @gromgull […]

https://www.leobard.net/blog/2025/05/24/the-copilot-delusion-creates-unsustainable-software/

@tante "But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity." that’s… that’s debatable. it’s almost philosophical. can i actually show them respect, even if i want, because their process is fucked and they will suffer through the software anyway, regardless of what i do. their tech department will find holes and exploit them, frankensteining something in to being thats only kind of what i delivered

@tante some people will defend that it will get better, that there are models being trained to debug, that adding tickets and convos with stakeholders is just a matter of enlarging the context window...

But it is not here now. And they're pushing and pushing this half baked shit like it's the most modern IDE while NOT actually improving the state of the art of our profession.

Call me again when you have a real product that can be trusted with real stakes. This is a toy.