What AI companies are doing is:

1. taking from a public resource (public websites, source code of FOSS projects, knowledge-sharing forums, etc)

2. destroying the public resource in the process (overloading the websites, flooding FOSS projects with slop PRs, disrubting the social dynamic required for forums to work)

3. renting you access to a worse version of the public resource they have destroyed

It also means that you can be an “ai assisted developer” without using any ai tools yourself, because you now get better tickets due to a vibecoded chrome extension that attaches the right internal docs, or something.

Of course not many large scale companies will change their approach, but I like to think that there’s a few teams out there who get to follow that framing and find renewed purpose (I know I do) by seeing how much quality can be improved by reshaping the narrative around the technology.

The management class has been trained to not do real work, but to have the appearance of work. LLM code has the appearance of hyper productivity. Whether it does or not is irrelevant to them.

The "good kind of centaurs" would not be that many. The price might end up like 10k/m. And then it's just not proffitable

The current state of tech has a serious evangelism problem. I think most people have seen "tech evangelism" in the wild in some form prior but now I feel it reached a new level with the current marketing and push of LLMs, the inherent trust the tech corportions got for free from many of them, the way they focused on management figures to promote it instead of people who would actively scrutinise this.

Given the state where selling software solutions was becoming difficult for many and all the major corporations ensuring that everyone had to race to the bottom or devalue software as much as possible to then ensure that no one competes, it isn't exactly surprising that they wanted to turn the industry into a casino where they benefit from the licensing of the pokies and all the devs have to play the game.

Combine this with an economy that has been cooked by these people, developer distrust andtrust from other organisations only being placed in large tech corporations (or those tech corps will lobby it because they have the means to do so).

Developers who are concerned just don't really have any ability to resist internally or have the bandwidth to do so unless there are financial punishment to organisations that lean into this rubbish (which... there will be but likely for most of them, they will go bankrupt before it is too late).

There is also an asynchronous game as well, if you received slop and have to handle it, you have been given the difficult work that is also not valued and it is now at such a large volume.

So, on the one hand, is maybe a short path to a sunk cost trap, on the other, a short cut to 60% of the way there?

The moderate voice is never terribly loud, but in this space there's just no upside to being the one saying "actually there's a way to use this tool that isn't utterly shit"

You're right though. Everyone else seemed to love it.

Think of any time executives show enterprise software brand loyalty and you’ll find lots of tools that devs and engineers are forced to use. Where ostensibly it’s the “right tool for the job” but, in actuality, some commercial aspect drove the choice.

So the reality is that we have some systems that are mission critical and MTBF is the right approach. We can’t recover from failure because failure is unrecoverable. Then there’s a whole spectrum of MTTR where failures can be withstood and repairs have varying levels of urgency. MTTR doesn’t have to be instant for everything, in systems where MTTR is the right approach.

Getting whole generations to think about a problem a certain way is a soft form of monopoly. Look at the push to get LLMs into schools and they’re trying desperately to run the same playbook on LLMs. Raise a generation who know no better.

Java?

The energy and water usage used to be a problem for mainframes. Watt's separate condenser in 1765 was essentially a water-cooled heat exchanger — the whole efficiency gain came from using cold water to condense steam without cooling the cylinder itself.

So the water usage argument has been around a while longer.

Data sourcing? You're trying to sort out which little calf and piglet went into your Weisswurst. Copyright in its current form has ruined the music industry, so let's spread the joy around

The problem with AI is the same as the Mirror Test for animal cognition. Y'all can stop screaming at the mirror - it's just you in there.