I haven’t seen anybody point this out yet. The owners of tech were never in it for the “tech”. It’s just a tool for them to wiggle their way up to the top. Trying to hit the jackpot so that they can wrest control of society from the current “old rich”.
Article about bad AI decisions
Thumbnail is AI
Lmao
I studied webdev and coding the hard way and I loved it. I felt unstoppable. But I still never got the job. But watching those people fail is still quite satisfying.
As a software engineer, I’m perfectly happy waiting around until they have to re-hire all of us at consulting rates because their tech stacks are falling the fuck apart <3
The jabronigrammers before me seem to have made a fine mess without the aid of an AI tool as it is…
Literally anybody who thought about the idea for more than ten seconds already realized this a long time ago; apparently this blog post needed to be written for the people who didn’t do even that…
You underestimate the dumbassery of Pencil-Pushers in tech companies (& also how genuinely sub-human they can be)
To your point at my last company party i got drunk and kept complimenting people by calling them human.
MBAs are like surgeons; their every solution is to cut.
Stop giving me bad ideas lol
e: I suck at markdown
A reason I didn’t see listed: they are just asking for competition. Yes by all means get rid of your most talented people who know how your business is run.
And can reproduce the whole business in a weekend with the help of AI. There are no moats anymore.
I wonder if there will eventually be a real Butlerian Jihad
Maybe after Herbert’s idiot son dies and someone else gets the rights
His books are so shit and totally miss the point of Frank Herbert’s books.
The jihad starts with the tech bros’ butlers, that’d be very poetic
Find one named Iain and radicalize him! So it would be the Butler Iain Jihad.
The irony of using an AI generated image for this post…
AI imagery makes any article look cheaper in my view, I am more inclined to “judge the book by its cover”.
Why would you slap something so lazy on top of a piece of writing you (assuming it isn’t also written by AI) put time and effort into?
this post is about programmers being replaced by ai. the writer seems ok with artists being replaced.
Or the picture is a statement for why artists shouldn’t be replaced either. Who can tell.
considering one of the other posts is about “democratizing AI” I lean towards my take.
Oh, it is for sure more likely.
I thought it was intentional AI slop
Yeah, I’m sure they left the spelling mistake in the image on purpose to get increased engagement from pedants like me. I’m sorry, it works on me.
https://defragzone.substack.com/p/run-massive-models-on-crappy-machines
the author doesn’t oppose AI, just programmers being replaced for it.
I know that it’s a meme to hate on generated images people need to understand just how much that ship has sailed.
Getting upset at generative AI is about as absurd as getting upset at CGI special effects or digital images. Both of these things were the subject of derision when they started being widely used. CGI was seen as a second rate knockoff of “real” special effects and digital images were seen as the tool of amateur photographers with their Photoshop tools acting as a crutch in place of real photography talent.
No amount of arguments film purist or nostalgia for the old days of puppets and models in movies was going to stop computer graphics and digital images capture and manipulation. Today those arguments seem so quaint and ignorant that most people are not even aware that there was even a controversy.
Digital images and computer graphics have nearly completely displaced film photography and physical model-based special effects.
Much like those technologies, generative AI isn’t going away and it’s only going to improve and become more ubiquitous.
This isn’t the hill to die on no matter how many upvotes you get.
But people still complain about CGI in film, likely for the same reason it was criticised in the past that you mention - it looks like ass, if done cheaply (today) or with early underdeveloped tech (back in the past). Similarly so, the vast majority of AI-generated images look lazy, generic (duh) and basically give me the “ick”.
Yeah, maybe they’ll get better in the future. But does that mean that we can’t complain about their ugliness (or whatever other issue we have with them) now?
people don’t like generated so bc it’s trainer on copyrighted data but if you don’t believe in copyright then it’s a tool like any other
There are thousands of different diffusion models, not all of them are trained on copyright protected work.
In addition, substantially transformative works are allowed to use content that is otherwise copy protected under the fair use doctrine.
It’s hard to argue that a model, a file containing the trained weight matrices, is in any way substantially similar to any existing copyrighted work. TL;DR: There are no pictures of Mickey Mouse in a GGUF file.
Fair use has already been upheld in the courts concerning machine learning models trained using books.
For instance, under the precedent established in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust and upheld in Authors Guild v. Google, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that mass digitization of a large volume of in-copyright books in order to distill and reveal new information about the books was a fair use.
And, perhaps more pragmatically, the genie is already out of the bottle. The software and weights are already available and you can train and fine-tune your own models on consumer graphics cards. No court ruling or regulation will restrain every country on the globe and every country is rapidly researching and producing generative models.
The battle is already over, the ship has sailed.
Exactly!!
Thank God, you get it.This video (which was trending a while ago) explained it pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt7GtDMTd3kAnd to add to what you said, people have some huge misunderstandings about how Gen AI work. They think it somehow just copy pastes portions of the art it was trained on, and that’s it. That’s not the case AT ALL, it’s not even close to that.
AI models should be allowed to be trained on copy righted data. If they shouldn’t be allowed to do that, then humans shouldn’t be allowed to do it either. Why do we give such advice to upcoming writers and musicians and artists, to consume the kind of content that they want to create in the future? To read the kind of books that they want to write like? To listen to the kind of music that they want to create? To look at pieces of art that they want to create? Should humans ALSO be limited to only publuc domain content?? I really don’t think so.
Again, Gen AI models don’t just copy paste stuff from their training set of data. They understand what makes up that piece of data. Just like a human does.
Thankfully, reasoning models like Deepseek-R1 have started to show the average person how an AI actually reasons and thinks about things and that they don’t just spew stuff out of nowhere in the hopes that it makes some kind of sense, slapping pieces of their training data set together to write something that’s barely comprehensible. The “Think” tags in such models really helped clarify some huge misunderstandings that some people had. Although, many many people are still left who have a really messed up view of how AIs work, and they somehow speak with such confidence about these topics with no knowledge of the technical details. It drives me nuts.
It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced the loss of experts to understand. Not a programmer but I worked in aerospace engineering for 35 years. The drive to transfer value to execs and other stakeholders by reducing the cost of those who literally make that value always ends costing more.
those executives act like parasites. They bring no value and just leech the life from the companies.
executives act like parasites
WE MAED TEH PROFITZ!!!1!!1
which is ironical since without them the profits would likely soar. Doing bad shit 101 is to pin the consequences of your actions on others and falsely claim any benefits others have managed to do as your own achievements.
IMO without execs, employees would get paid for a greater percentage of their labor and profits would go down.
what profits? the ones that end up in the pockets of the executives?
Yes
Executives think they are the most important part of the company. They are high level managers, that is all.
I’d argue the CEO is the most important person, usually. We see dipshits like Musk and turn around and bag on all of them.
Think of a business, doesn’t matter if it’s local or national. How do the employees act? Are they happy and seem to be doing useful work? Are they downcast and depressed looking?
Sometimes it’s the local manager staving off corporate bullshit, but company culture mostly rolls down from the CEO. They saying, “Shit rolls downhill.”, works both ways.
Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow’s executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW
It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
What happened to ankor?
On a more generic scale (whatever that means), we went from coding serious stuff in Ada with contracts and designs and architectures, to throwing everything in the trash while forgetting any kind of pride and responsibility in less than 50 years. AI is the next step in that global engineering enshittification (I hate that word but it’s appropriate).
Whether AI has a future or not, no one can deny that SWE is an absolute mess of shitty practices. If AI stays as it is, we’re going down with it.
<cough>Boeing<cough>
Everyone. But Boeing did a pretty fucked up job of it.
I’m fine with this. Let it all break, we’ve earned it.
I work for a fortune 500 company.
just recently lost a principal engineer that built an entire platform over the last four years.
just before they left I noticed they were using AI an awful lot. like…a lot a lot. like, “I don’t know the answer on a screen share so I’ll ask ChatGPT how to solve the problem and copy/paste it directly into the environment until it works” a lot.
they got fired for doing non-related shit.
it’s taken us three months, hundreds of hours from at least 5 other principal engineers to try to unravel this bullshit and we’re still not close.
the contributions and architecture scream AI all over it.
Point is. I’ll happily let idiots destroy the world of software because I’ll make fat bank later as a consultant fixing their bullshit.
Well, also if the guy was just dumping AI generated code arbitrarily into your product, that pretty significantly risks the copyright over the entire product into which the generated stuff was integrated (meaning, anyone can do whatever the fuck they want with it).
you’re not wrong. unfortunately that’s not how legal sees it.
not sure what they’re snorting, but it must be good shit.
I’m an IP attorney whose been pretty specialized in ML-enabled technologies for a decade now, and have worked in-house for fortune 500 companies so I’m pretty familiar with how these queries are often handled, especially at multinats. There honestly probably isn’t someone in your legal with all three of seniority, understanding and keeping up with the legal nuances, and understanding of the underlying technologies. The overlap in my experience is few and far between.
That’s what I expect if I’m fired and rehired: at least +25% on my salary.
We hired a junior at work from a prestigious university. He uses ChatGPT all the time but denies it. I know that because all his comments in the code are written like some new Tolkien book. Last time I checked his code, I told him it had something like 20 bugs and told him how to fix that because I’m not a bad guy. The next day, he came back with a program that was very very different. Not knowing how to apply my fixes, he used another prompt and the whole thing was different with new bugs. I told my boss I was not wasting time on that shit again.
There’s also the tribal knowledge of people who’ve worked somewhere for a few years. There’s always a few people who just know where or how a particular thing works and why it works that way. AI simply cannot replace that.
I don’t disagree with that, but there’s so many “wtf is this shit” moments that defy all logic and known practices.
like for example, six different branches of the same repo that deploy to two different environments in a phased rollout. branches 1-3 are prod, 4-6 are dev. phases go 3,1,2 for prod and 6,4,5 for dev. they are numbered as well.
also, the pipelines create a new bucket every build. so there’s over 700 S3 buckets with varying versions of the frontend…that then gets moved into…another S3 bucket with public access.
my personal favorite is the publicly accessible and non-access controlled lambdas with hard-coded lambda evocation URLs in them. lambda A has a public access evocation URL configured instead of using API Gateway. Lambda B has that evocation URL hard coded into the source that’s deployed.
there’s so much negligent work here I swear they did it on purpose.
there’s so much negligent work here I swear they did it on purpose.
Depending on the place, it’s the “work insurance” - companies would usually think twice before firing the only person who can understand the spaghetti. Now they won’t need said person to generate “working” code
Institutional knowledge takes years to replace.
Imagine a company that fires its software engineers, replaces them with AI-generated code, and then sits back, expecting everything to just work. This is like firing your entire fire department because you installed more smoke detectors. It’s fine until the first real fire happens.
This is a bad analogy.
It would be more akin to firing your fire departments, because you installed automatic hoses in front of everyone’s homes. When a fire starts, the hoses will squirt water towards the fire, but sometimes it’ll miss, sometimes it’ll squirt backwards, sometimes it’ll squirt the neighbour’s house, and sometimes it’ll squirt the fire.
Sure but they’re not going to fire all of them. They’re going to fire 90% then make 10% put out the fires and patch the leaks while working twice as many hours for less pay.
The company will gradually get worse and worse until bankrupt or sold and the c-suite bails with their golden parachutes.
I don’t know. I look at it like firing all your construction contractors after built out all your stores in a city. You might need some construction trades to maintain your stores and your might need to relocate a store every once in a while, but you don’t need the same construction staff on had as you did with the initial build out.
Software engineer here. You’re completely wrong. The amount of work it takes to maintain and extend functionality to existing software is even bigger than the original cost of building it.
Get some time understanding how software teams work and you’ll understand. There’s a reason C Suites are hoping AI generated code can replace developers. They can’t hire enough of them.
Is there really a need to extend functionality like there was 10 years ago?
Yes. That’s at least half of the work I do on a daily basis. How else do companies in the same market compete with each other if they cannot add on to functionality and remain static? That’s a quick way to lose market share to your competition.
We’re at a point of effective monopoly and vastly increased costs of creating competition.
The spigot of free money has been turned off, so most projects today need to have a planned out ROI, which is why enshitification has become such a big thing recently. Improvement for competition sake is out the door unless the incumbent is weak or a jump is needed as the existing revenue stream is collapsing.
What are you going on about?
I don’t work in a space with a monopoly.
My employer doesn’t have free money. They compete in a huge market and earn money while doing so.
Not every company has the business model you described. The world would not run if that was the case.
Yeah, but a lot of the discussion has been about those companies given how well they pay and how dominant they are in the industry.
In my experience, you actually need more people to maintain and extend existing software compared to the initial build out.
Usually because of scalability concerns, increasing complexity of the system and technical debt coming due.
Most extension today is enshitification. We’ve also seen major platforms scale to the size of Earth.
If you’re only going to maintain and don’t have a plan on adding features outside of duct taping AI to the software, what use is it maintaining a dev team at the size you needed it to be when creating new code?
While true, that is a weak analogy. Software rots and needs constant attention of competent people or shit stacks.
I’m not saying you can fire everyone, but the maintenance team doesn’t need to be the size of the development team if the goal is to only maintain features.
It works for a while. Keep a few seniors and everything will be fine. Then you want new features and that’s when shit hits the fan. Want me to add a few buttons? 1 month because I have to study all the random shit that was generated last week.
Twitter and Tumblr are operating on skeleton crews but are able to make changes.
Craigslist is still around even though it hasn’t changed much since the '90’s.
There is an entire industry of companies that buy old MMO’S and maintain them at a low cost for a few remaining players.
Southwest Airlines still runs ticketing on a Windows 95 server.
I think you’ll see more companies accept managed decline as a business strategy.
It’s funny you use southwest as an example in this. I flew with them for the first time this year and it was easily the worst technical experience from an IT perspective that I have ever had. Sure I got from point A to point B, but everything involved with buying the ticket, getting through security, tracking my flight, boarding time, etc was worse than every other flight I’ve been on. The app was awful and basic features like delay notifications or pulling up the digital ticket made an already expensive as hell experience way more stressful. Windows 95 isn’t keeping up
But no one is flying Southwest for a best in class experience. It doesn’t have to be a great system to use, just a system that does the bare minimum.
Twitter, Tumblr, Craigslist: those web sites are feature complete and require low maintenance.
Southwest Airlines: good for them, but if the servers have issues, they will lose billions while trying frantically to find the retired guy who maintained that monster.
This is prophetic and yet as clear as day to anyone who has actually had to rely on their own code for anything.
I have lately focused all of my tech learning efforts and home lab experiments on cloud-less approaches. Sure the cloud is a good idea for scalable high traffic websites, but it sure also seems to enable police state surveillance and extreme vendor lock-in.
It’s really just a focus on fundamentals. But all those cool virtualization technologies that enable ‘cloud’ are super handy in a local system too. Rolling back container snapshots on specific services while leaving the general system unimpacted is useful anywhere.
But it is all on hardware I control. Apropos of the article, the pendulum will swing back toward more focus on local infrastructure. Cloud won’t go away, but more people are realizing that it also means someone else owns your data/your business.
I think they were suckered in also by the supposed lower cost of running services, which, as it happens, isn’t lower at all and in fact is more expensive. But you laid off the Datacenter staff so. Pay up, suckers.
Neat toolsets though.
The cloud provides incredible flexibility, scale, and reliability. It is expensive to have 3+ data centers with a datacenter staff. If the data center was such a great deal for the many 9s of reliability provided by the cloud, company’s would be shifting back in mass at this point
Oh no way. It was a year(s)-long process to get to the cloud, then the devs got hooked on all the toys AWS was giving them and got strapped in even further. They couldn’t get out now if they wanted to. Not without huge expense and re-writing a bunch of stuff. No CTO is going die on that hill.
They jumped in the cloud for the same reason they jumped into AI - massive hype. Only the cloud worked. And now % of the profits are all Amazon’s. No app store needed. MuwAHhahahAhahahaa
I’m just a dabbler at coding and even i can see getting rid of programmers and relying to ai for it will lead to disaster. Ai is useful, but only for smallest scraps of code because anything bigger will get too muddled. For me, it liked to come up with its own stupid ideas and then insist on getting stuck on those so i had to constantly reset the conversation. But i managed to have it make useful little function that i couldnt have thought up myself as it used some complex mathematical things.
Also relying on it is quick way to kind of get things done but without understanding at all how things work. Eventually this will lead to such horrible and unsecure code that no one can fix or maintain. Though maybe its good thing eventually since it will bring those shitty companies to ruin. any leadership in those companies should be noted down now though, so they cant pretend later to not have had anything to do with it.
Even if I ask AI for how to do a process it will frequently respond with answers for the wrong version, even though I gave the version, parameters that don’t work, hand waving answers that are useless, etc.
I find it’s the most useful when asking it for small snippets of code or dealing with boilerplate stuff. Anything more complicated usually results in something broken.
give it a few more years
Yeah, like bitcoins, NFTs, and Tesla driving themselves.
Bitcoins are there, aren’t they?
Yes, still a scam and still useless for most people. We’ve been waiting forever, maybe like AI.
Given that even stack overflow is being mostly answered by AI, don’t expect that to actually get better, unless you’re counting on sensitive coding data being “legally” siphoned from AI users
yeah, there are many things its easier to just give up having the ai do it. even if you somehow succeed it will likely be such mess it gives you its not worth it
AI mostly seems useful when you don’t know a specific concept and just need the base ideas. That said, given it’s often confidently wrong and doesn’t involve humans actively steering you toward better ideas, I still find Stack Overflow more helpful. Sometimes the answer to your problem is to stop doing what you are trying to do and attack the problem from a different angle.
yeah, though for questions people on stackoverflow would consider stupid or beneath them, ai was superior as it never gets angry with you. How i see the ai is kind of like being able to ask the knowledge it consists of questions. But since it has also been fed with garbage and its all there like ingredients of a soup, who knows what affects what so you really dont want to trust it too much.
I also find it is best when I’m very specific and give as many identifiers as possible. App name, version, OS, quoted error code, etc.
Like relying on automated systems for aircraft so much. You get things like planes going into landing mode because they think they are close to the runway.
Although I agree, I think AI code generation is the follow up mistake. The original mistake was to offshore coding to fire qualified engineers.
Not all of offshore is terrible, that’d be a dumb generalization, but there are some terrible ones out there. A few of our clients that opted to offshore are being drowned is absolute trash code. Given that we always have to clean it up anyway, I can see the use-case for AI instead of that shop.
I think the core takeaway is your shouldn’t outsource core capabilities. If the code is that critical to your bottomline, pay for quality (which usually means no contractors - local or not).
If you outsource to other developers or AI it means most likely they will care less and/or someone else can just as easily come along and do it too.
…shouldn’t outsource core capabilities.
This right here.
The core takeaway is that except for a few instances the executives still don’t understand jack shit and when a smooth talking huckster dazzles them with ridiculous magic to make them super rich they all follow them to the poke.
Judges and Executives understand nothing about computers in 2025. that’s the fucked up part. AI is just how we’re doing it this time.
Companies that are incompetently led will fail and companies that integrate new AI tools in a productive and useful manner will succeed.
Worrying about AI replacing coders is pointless. Anyone who writes code for a living understands the limitations that these models have. It isn’t going to replace humans for quite a long time.
Language models are hitting some hard limitations and were unlikely to see improvements continue at the same pace.
Transformers, Mixture of Experts and some training efficiency breakthroughs all happened around the same time which gave the impression of an AI explosion but the current models are essentially taking advantage of everything and we’re seeing pretty strong diminishing returns on larger training sets.
So language models, absent a new revolutionary breakthrough, are largely as good as they’re going to get for the foreseeable future.
They’re not replacing software engineers, at best they’re slightly more advanced syntax checkers/LSPs. They may help with junior developer level tasks like refactoring or debugging… but they’re not designing applications.
Companies that are incompetently led will fail and companies that integrate new AI tools in a productive and useful manner will succeed.
Using AI to lobby for bailouts? Very clever!
