/rant

These are weird times. I feel like any developer who’s tried letting AI write code should recognize that it hurts productivity when you have chase down bugs in badly written code nobody on your team understands. For anything important, that will need to be maintained, less time would be spent designing, writing, and maintaining the code yourself. There are even studies showing AI hurts productivity. Yet, many developers seem to have bought the hype, and managers and investors doubly so.

AFAIK, few of these startups that tout heavy AI usage ever ship anything. The large companies that are forcing AI usage are progressively degrading their products.

Seems like the owner class is just going to keep on deluding themselves, companies are going to keep laying off, everybody is going to keep shipping shit that doesn’t work, if they ship anything at all, and investors are going to keep dumping money into businesses producing no value. The entire system has never felt so fake. At least during the dot-com bubble corporations weren’t doing mass layoffs to excite investors.

I feel like the owner class has got so powerful now, society has regressed to the point where we’re back to being ruled by dumb, delusional, psychopathic royalty imposing their will onto the masses. (Yeah, it’s kind of been that way for a long time, but it seems to be quickly getting worse).

As a developer on a team of 20ish that use AI heavily, daily, I’d argue there are proper ways of using it as a tool that substantially increases productivity and quality while also reducing bugs and improving maintainability.

But I would also say that 75%+ of people I encounter aren’t leveraging it properly or even close to properly. Also too many people use ChatGPT and Copilot which are just bottom of the barrel garbage and then wonder why the output is also garbage.

But I agree that too many people and companies lean into AI too heavily and incorrectly and there will be a reckoning. I’m all for it.

everyone using ai says some variation of this

acting like they do proper code review on this ai gen code but we’ve had so many examples of how people well before ai carried massive tech debt and cut corners so I have zero faith

much less the numerous examples of slop laden bugs making it to live with major companies in the us

ai just amplifies and obfuscates the problem