Comment by thephyber

I’m less anti-“anything AI” and more anti-“how AI seems to be used right now”.

It is:

being used as smokescreen for massive layoffs industry wide.

a repeat of the business models of 1999-2000 (growth without profit, race to IPO, promises of infinite TAM).

the business execs are following the crowd, insisting on token maxxxing, not value-to-the-customer maxxxing. There are reports that many companies have already exhausted their annual AI budget by April.

most companies don’t know how to measure if it’s actually increasing value AT ALL.

my former coworkers say it’s empowering non-engineers to write bad code / features which are a net negative. Prior to AI, bad ideas needed an engineer to tacitly approve of it, but now the bad ideas can bypass the engineer at light speed. 10x development speed is VERY BAD if the average change is a net negative.

people are leaning on LLM inference instead of basic tasks such as keeping web bookmarks organized. It will cause cognitive atrophy.

the foundation model companies are heavily subsidizing my $20/mo plan, so I’m pretty sure it becomes unaffordable once they charge cost plus for inference.

I’m personally experimenting with AI for all aspects of business (not just coding). I’m sometimes vibe coding prototypes and sometimes building a rigorous full-SDLC app.

I watched an interview with Ed Zitron yesterday and I found myself agreeing vehemently with his appropriate level of cynicism about the AI industry and how business is using it right now.