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.
I ever so slightly miss all of the Internet Explorer 6 hacks. Sure it was utterly stupid they were required and we are in a much better position now, but it’s less fun now. Everything just uses Chromium.
Fortunately Safari is still utter garbage so we’ve got that.
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”.
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
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.
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.
I’m fine with this. Let it all break, we’ve earned it.
I just hope people won’t go back to these abusive jobs. The oligarchy that runs the US has shown it is more than happy to lay people off to cool wages and the Fed is more than happy to blame workers getting paid a reasonable amount as the cause of inflation.
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’m sorry, I mostly agree with the sentiment of the article in a feel-good kind of way, but it’s really written like how people claim bullies will get their comeuppance later in life, but then you actually look them up later and they have high paying jobs and wonderful families. There’s no substance here, just a rant.
The author hints at analogous cases in the past of companies firing all of their engineers and then having to scramble to hire them back, but doesn’t actually get into any specifics. Be specific! Talk through those details. Prove to me the historical cases are sufficiently similar to what we’re starting to see now that justifies the claims of the rest of the article.
I disagree. For example:
Now, six months later, you realize that your AI-generated software is riddled with security holes. Whoops! Your database is leaking private financial data like a sieve
We have seen this a thousand times before there was an AI. AI is like a cheap contractor out of school and companies who use it extensively will get the same results. It’s a pragmatic thing, not some phantasm about bullies. I have told so many times “I told you so” to previous managers that I trust it will happen again and again.
Come back in 3 years and the “historical cases” will have appeared.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 upvoted 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow’s executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW
