This isn't just about AI, and I hope my friends who run their own experiments with local LLMs and who use chatbots to as a sounding board rather than as an obsequious servant or unpaid robotic coding intern understand I'm not talking about them.

We (the US) have a president who wants all the respect of the position without doing the work of being a national executive or showing competence and vision in leadership, a Secretary of Defense trolled into a half-assed, doomed, failure of an intervention, a HHS chief and all his giblet-brained underlings that fancy themselves health professionals armed with homeopathic levels of ability and overinflated delusions of adequacy. Don't forget Brilliant Auto Business Genius whose flagship project is a low-poly asset rejected concept art for 1997's "Carmageddon" that has sales worse than the Edsel. Every C-suite malingerer whose primary competencies are being tall, white, male, and credulously overconfident who wants all the monies but doesn't want to have employees or accountability or a product or service anyone wants or needs. "Gig" employers that cosplay as banks, hotels, taxi services, delivery services. Web search engines that spew randomized text rather than links to authoritative and correct information sources.

Atlas shrugged then laid off everyone who knew what they were doing because his best friend ChatGPT told him to. The same societal endgame but there is no Galt's Gulch full of Libertarian Übermensch, just hundreds of thousands of idled professionals helplessly watching toddlers "driving" fire trucks, "flying" planes, "writing" software, "creating" art, etc. A societal disaster, a complete civilizational self-own, promulgated by modern day tulip speculators and assorted fascist-adjacent financiers.

I don't see any of this getting better until the adults among us pick up the toddlers, take away their toys, and put them all down for a nice long nap.

And they are right. LLMs make it easier for devs to do work that doesn't matter in an industry that doesn't care, where the only thing that's measured is some bullshit measure that's disconnected from actual outcomes

Many of those most vocal about the dysfunctions of LLM-coding were ALREADY WARNING ABOUT THE DYSFUNCTIONS OF THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY BEFORE "AI". The dysfunctions predate this particular bubble and many in software have been concerned about them for years.

There is little to no downside to poor software quality and the upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies

Some corners of the software industry are less affected. Others, such as web dev, are more affected

For example, the stock price for Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is up 12% today over its peak before it

Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences