What the hell is going on right now?:
Engineers are burning out. Orgs expect their senior engineering staff to be able to review and contribute to "vibe-coded" features that don't work. My personal observation is that the best engineers are highly enthusiastic about helping newer team members contribute and learn.
Instead of their comments being taken to heart, reflected on, and used as learning opportunities, hapless young coders are instead using feedback as simply the next prompt in their "AI" masterpiece. I personally have witnessed and heard first-hand accounts where it was incredibly obvious a junior engineer was (ab)using LLM tools.
In a recent company town-hall, I watched as a team of junior engineers demoed their latest work. I couldn't tell you what exactly it did, or even what it was supposed to do - it didn't seem like they themselves understood. However, at a large enough organization, it's not about what you do, its about what people think you do. Championing their "success", a senior manager goaded them into bragging about their use of "AI" tools to which they responded "This is four thousand lines of code written by Claude". Applause all around.
I was asked to add a small improvement to an existing feature. After reviewing the code, I noticed a junior engineer was the most recent to work on that feature. As I always do, I reached out to let them know what I'd be doing and to see if they had any insight that would be useful to me. Armed with the Github commit URL, I asked for context around their recent change. I can't know for sure, but I'd be willing to put money down that my exact question and the commit were fed directly into an LLM which was then copy and pasted back to me. I'm not sure why, but I felt violated. It felt wrong.
A friend recently confided in me that he's been on a team of at least 5 others that have been involved in reviewing a heavily vibe-coded PR over the past month. A month. Reviewing slop produced by an LLM. What are the cost savings of paying ChatGPT $20 a month and then having a literal team of engineers try and review and merge the code?
Another friend commiserated the difficulty of trying to help an engineer contribute at work. "I review the code, ask for changes, and then they immediately hit me with another round of AI slop."
Here's the thing - we want to help. We want to build good things. Things that work well, that make people's lives easier. We want to teach people how to do software engineering! Any engineer is standing entirely on the shoulders of their mentors and managers who've invested time and energy into them and their careers. But what good is that investment if it's simply copy-pasted into the latest "model" that "is literally half a step from artificial general intelligence"? Should we instead focus our time and energy into training the models and eliminate the juniors altogether?
What a sad, dark world that would be.
Here's an experiment for you: stop using "AI". Try it for a day. For a week. For a month.
Recently, I completely reset my computer. I like to do it from time to time. As part of that process I prune out any software that I no longer use. I've been paying for Claude Pro for about 6 months. But slowly, I've felt like it's just a huge waste of time. Even if I have to do a few independent internet searches and read through a few dozen stack overflow and doc pages, my own conclusion is so much more reliable and accurate than anything an LLM could ever spit out.
So what good are these tools? Do they have any value whatsoever?
Objectively, it would seem the answer is no. But at least they make a lot of money, right?
Is anyone making money on AI right now? I see a pipeline that looks like this:
- "AI" is applied to some specific, existing area, and a company spins up around it because it's so much more "efficient"
- AI company gets funding from venture capitalists
- AI company give funding to AI service providers such as OpenAI in the form of paying for usage credits
- AI company evaporates
This isn't necessarily all that different than the existing VC pipeline, but the difference is that not even OpenAI is making money right now. I believe this is because the technology is inherently flawed and cannot scale to meet the demand. It simply consumes too much electricity to ever be economically viable, not to mention the serious environmental concerns.
We can say our prayers that Moore's Law will come back from the dead and save us. We can say our prayers that the heat death of the universe will be sufficiently prolonged in order for every human to become a billionaire. We can also take an honestly not even hard look at reality and realize this is a scam.
The emperor is wearing no clothes.
Related Stories
Archivist David Rosenthal observes now that more material is posted online by LLMs than actual people, the bots are starting to ingest their own digital excrement, creating a negative feedback loop.
In the belief that "more is better", Large Language Models (LLMs) have insatiable appetites for training data. They started by scraping everything on the Web (robots.txt be dammed). When that ran out they downloaded the various pirate libraries (copyright be dammed). That exhausted the texts easily available in digital form, but their hunger wasn't assuaged. As for images, they partly used CAPTCHAs but mostly paid vast numbers of poor people to label the images with what they showed.
When the supply of text ran low, people observed that the LLMs were capable of generating human-like text in large quantities. The obvious idea was to pour the output of the LLMs into their training sets. This wasn't just a conscious decision, it was inevitable. The advent of LLMs rapidly polluted the Web with LLM output. Greg Druck's AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans notes that:
We observe significant growth in primarily AI-generated articles, coinciding with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. After only 12 months, primarily AI-generated articles accounted for 35.9% of articles published.
In Q1 2025, the quantity of primarily AI-generated articles being published on the web nearly equaled the quantity of human-written articles, 49.6% vs. 50.4%. In Q4 2025, primarily AI-generated articles surpassed human-written at 50.9%, before returning to 49.9% in Q1 2026.
Even if slop were not of undesirable quality, it is not produced by humans and thus is completely unsuitable as training data.
Previously:
(2026) A Wikipedia Clone Built on AI Hallucinations is Here to Hasten Along the Death of the Internet
(2025) When It All Comes Crashing Down: The Aftermath of the AI Boom
(2025) AI Favors Texts Written by Other AIs, Even When They're Worse Than Human Ones
(2025) What the Hell is Going on Right Now?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2025, @05:26PM (1 child)
Everything is bullshit
Nothing is real
Sound familiar? It should, but now it's true
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Monday September 08 2025, @12:19AM
...and on top of that of course is that no one's being paid enough to do whatever it is they're expected to do. And it's not just the poor bastard working the register at the corner grocery, I guess it's happening in STEM, various trades, etc. too.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday September 07 2025, @08:18PM (1 child)
The end of the dotcom era had similar feels.
Including the underpants gnome meme being presented as a serious business model. For the noobs out there:
Phase 1: (do something stupid)
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit
A lot of the problem is graphs being presented by marketing as exponential to the moon models of capability and profit are likely IRL more like a logarithmic approach to an asymptote thats too low to be successful most of the time.
Perhaps, AI will be very useful at replacing 60 to 90 IQ tasks that have zero legal or financial liability... there is a business model in that, it'll annihilate human-based "customer support" at companies that only pretend to care about customers.
I think the crop of employees who don't care about plagiarism claims or legal licenses will result in an interesting push toward W-2 employment... there's no point in feudal slaves that just run the AI API for you; just do that yourself. Meanwhile the 1099 folks (my peeps) who "get it done" will continue to be paid, the difference is we'll be the only people being paid!
There will also be bizarre impacts on management. You can fight other departments or defend against other departments using AI, so eventually at dysfunctional corporations most of their AI budget will be spent on internal strife until some "brilliant" CEO cuts all the jobs and "brilliant" CEO #2 cuts all the AI budget which wasn't being used. Meanwhile job titles and career paths based on number of direct reports will get weird when most of the bottom of the pyramid becomes AI API calls instead of human manual labor. Think of a company that just doesn't care and only goes thru the motions, its got a director of customer support that used to have 100 part time minimum wage employees not accomplishing much. Suddenly he's got 1000 docker containers making AI API calls and zero direct reports. At some HR-driven orgs, he's no longer a director. In fact, as soon as he can be replaced by a report generator script, he's probably not got a job anymore. That flows upward, now the OPs VP lost one of his direct reports lowering him from a senior VP to junior VP level position.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 07 2025, @10:59PM
IQ is a poor measure of human capacity to contribute to a group effort and near meaningless in describing the capabilities of a card catalog, or any souped up variation thereof.
I have been W2 for 35 of my 36 years in the market. Those were the years when I did real original research, was granted patents, launched successful and not so successful new products in the market. My 1099 gigs were mostly polishing hyper inflated egos. Again, a bad metric to generalize with.
Internal corporate strife is one of many costs of scale. In today's world there are numerous benefits of scale that far outweigh these costs.
Note: life is not, and never has been, fair or even logical. It is a game of survival (and mating) and there are no rules except those we impose upon ourselves. AI is just another fixation of the moment, it doesn't represent a large step toward SkyNet, just incremental progress like we have been making since the Steam Engine.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Sunday September 07 2025, @08:23PM (1 child)
I wonder if the author was aware of the recent scientific-ish study that determined the labor savings from AI use was measured experimentally system-wide to be about -20% IIRC.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 08 2025, @11:52AM
Fans will call that transitional retraining costs. Truth is, it helps in some areas, hurts in others and it will take time to sort all that out.
I am suddenly reminded of 1995, when I was having to sell office mates on the benefits of connecting their computers to the network.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by turgid on Sunday September 07 2025, @08:53PM (1 child)
*grabs beer and popcorn*
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday September 08 2025, @05:10PM
Here's a performance art version [youtu.be] to go along with that.
That's nice and all, but are we also prepared to do the opposite [theregister.com] to drive the point home? Not a coding example, I'm more trying to convey a "vibe" there.
(Score: 5, Funny) by istartedi on Sunday September 07 2025, @09:05PM (18 children)
Two hundred years ago there were no communists or switch board operators.
A hundred years ago we had both, but no IT support.
Today we have communists and IT support.
The trick is to create meaningful new jobs faster than we create communists.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday September 07 2025, @09:17PM (13 children)
It sounds like we're going to have a lot of communists soon then.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Sunday September 07 2025, @11:03PM (12 children)
Unfortunately, that seems to be the direction in which we're headed. They become absolutely furious when confronted with the notion that their movement is just a dysfunctional artifact of technological progress; but that's the way I see it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday September 07 2025, @11:16PM (11 children)
Unfortunately? It's pretty much inevitable that when technology hits the point where nobody is actually required to produce all the necessities of life, and most of the luxuries, that there's basically two possible directions to proceed. One is a bunch of communists where everything is being shared, and the other is some sort of nightmare dystopia where the people in charge wipe out as many people as needed to keep everybody else toiling away. And I don't think the latter is as likely to yield a stable society as the former.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Sunday September 07 2025, @11:26PM (9 children)
You're buying the communist ideal. The communist reality is different.
The other alternative, where oligarchs cull the herd is obviously awful. Communism sounds so much better, much like the first alcoholic beverage of the evening. "I'd like one Luigi special, please". Boy, that was delicious. I'm going to guzzle a six-pack of those. Amazing. Still on my feet, but need to sleep it off. Now the next morning there's a bit of a hang-over so you go for a bit of the ol' hair of the dog that bit you and knock off a local banker or two. Eventually it becomes an all consuming passion but hooch is in short supply. The next-door neighbor might be potable. Let's find out...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday September 07 2025, @11:42PM (8 children)
I'm not, I just happen to live in the real world. Billions of people are not going to agree to starve to death in order to avoid communism. It's just not going to happen. We're likely nearing the end of the treadmill in terms of new types of jobs being created that take up the slack from jobs being automated out of existence.
Like I've already posted here, there will be a job shortage severe enough for most people to not have jobs if nothing is done to prevent it. At that point, you get communism or you get a brutal dystopia on a scale that is hard to comprehend. Most people would prefer communism over the death squads, brutal repression and likely famine that's the alternative when we run out of jobs.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday September 08 2025, @12:30AM (5 children)
Communism or death is a false dichotomy.
Most people are not ideologically bent. A mixed economy is best. If they try to abolish food assistance in the USA, people will riot but they still won't want Chairman Whoever dictating everything... I hope. I mean, it's selling pretty well on the right and the left is acting like they won't eat up that slop too. History says otherwise, followed by... communism has produced quite a few famines, followed by "That wasn't really communism", followed by... me just closing the browser and noodling on my guitar to decompress, because the nothing is ever communism card is always in their deck, and they think it's a winner when it's really just a pointless game that sucks.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday September 08 2025, @12:43AM (4 children)
Sigh, as usual the anticommunist is actually an anti-intellectual that doesn't really care about reality, just rattle off a few pseudo-intellectual statements and then pretend like we've had actual communism.
They're already abolishing food assistance int he USA, have you not been paying attention? Just within the last few months they passed that BBB atrocity that will lead to benefits cuts for a bunch of people. As far as your claims about communism leading to famines, which ones was that? Because the USSR and PRC didn't have famine because of communism, they had famine because the authoritarians running the place made incredibly stupid decisions. Regardless of how their economies were run, that would still have happened.
And no, things can be communism, we just haven't ever seen actual communism as there's always been at least 2 classes in every allegedly communist country we've seen since the invention of communism.
As far as it being a false dichotomy, it really isn't. The area in the middle is incredibly unstable and how many people are going to accept a status quo where they're literally working just to avoid being communists? And how many of them would tolerate working just to avoid the dystopia? The whole notion that it's a false dichotomy completely ignores the fact that at some point, it does become a dichotomy. When there are no actually jobs out there that need doing, that kind of eliminates most of the actual room between those two possibilities.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday September 08 2025, @01:11AM (2 children)
I could reply in a similar tone, but I won't. It's not productive.
Cuts are not abolition, I'm not in favor of those cuts. I can see how this bolsters your pessimistic outlook that we're going down in to some kind of dystopia. Communism certainly does lead to famine, because the revolutionary mentality tends to encourage people to change things suddenly that are better left unchanged. Communism also attracts political opportunists and in this case we can lay a lot of the blame at one such opportunist: Troyfim Lysenko, who influenced agricultural policy in both countries. In other cases such as Cambodia, the famines involved a different kind of re-ordering of society. In that case it was the communists who were anti-intellectual to an absolute fault.
It sounds like we're closer than we both realize perhaps; except that I see the 2 classes as inevitable and you don't. Communism goes against human nature. It tries to eliminate the race for cash, the desire to win; but it ends up replacing the race for cash with a direct race for power. It's not surprising that when the USSR broke apart, oligarchs fell out. They were powerful operators of state owned entities, who simply transitioned from one power structure to another.
I'm less pessimistic. I see the post-WW2 period in the USA as having a feature where there was a peace between labor and capital. Private sector union membership was higher, CEO income was a much lower multiple of wages, and income/wealth disparity wasn't as great. It lasted for decades, while social structures and other aspects of society were actually less stable. There might be a race riot or a war protest; but you earned 5% on your passbook. It lasted for decades. I think it ironically broke down after the USSR collapsed and the New World Order (Bush 41 literally used that term) of Free Trade agreements was put in place. Trumpism is a disorderly, insane right-wing reaction to all that--but the Battle in Seattle wasn't partisan--it had people from a wide political spectrum.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday September 08 2025, @02:46AM (1 child)
Cuts aren't abolition until they are. There's been a trend by both parties to move towards more and more restrictions on welfare and more and more paperwork requirements. We aren't to actual abolition yet, but you're a fool if you don't realize that's where we're going. You'll note the near complete lack of any effort put into things that would prevent people from needing to go on benefits. The basic plan is to eliminate all the funding for the program and make it effectively impossible to actually qualify. Sure, that might not technically be abolition, but I'm not sure that the difference is important at that point.
I see the classes, you'd have to be absolutely blind not to notice the oligarchs and everybody else. The thing of it is that the only reason why actual communism hasn't ever been tried is that we've both had to have somebody doing work and somebody to coordinate it. And the people coordinating it have always hand themselves more power and privileges than are appropriate. In a post scarcity economy where all the work is being automated there's no reason for there to be a middle ground sort of status quo. It had been working out to a large extent in the US for a while, but the moment that the masses stopped worrying about their material conditions, we saw a slide into authoritarianism. All the screwed up motives don't disappear simply because we have plenty of resources. There's always going to be people that vote against their interests because their interests are aligned with people of color, and there's always going to be psychopaths that want to control everything for their benefit. A sort of middle ground situation is just not going to be stable any time soon and we're on track to have all the automation to do it within the next century.
If anything, the post-WW2 period ought to be a bit of a wake up call in terms of people ceding any power that's been allowed to accumulate into the hands of a small number of people. The Boomers in the US had one of the greatest economies ever handed to them. They had to put in far less effort on the whole than any other generation to walk the face of the earth, and they wound up giving it all up so that people of color couldn't be cut out of a share any other way. And then pulled up the ladder behind them. I don't see any plausible way of avoiding that any time soon. We're on the whole moving in the opposite direction. Of the largest countries in the world, both China and the US are moving more and more towards authoritarianism. I'm less familiar with India, but I don't know that they're doing the same stupid stuff, so who knows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2025, @01:05PM
Their caste social discrimination is even more bs than anything else, plus they workship cows
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 08 2025, @11:59AM
When I visited the DDR in 1989/90, food was the one thing in abundant cheap supply. Not luxury food, but basic bread was ten cents a kilo, and everyone had plenty of money for that. Shelter was also readily available and affordable. Anything branded luxury, like a bicycle, was unobtanium - party favors only, 10-100x of the cost in the West, which is what led to the defacto exchange rate of 100:1 on the currency.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by DadaDoofy on Monday September 08 2025, @10:02AM (1 child)
"Most people would prefer communism over the death squads, brutal repression and likely famine"
Did you sleep through history class? Communism is death squads, brutal repression and famine.
(Score: 2) by weirsbaski on Tuesday September 09 2025, @02:17AM
No more (or less) than any other system of government
Yeah, there's a lot of that going around.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday September 08 2025, @04:40AM
We have evidence for either of these two being applied in reality to such a society? My view is rather that societies wing it until the negatives accumulate to the point where society breaks down - the breakdown can be temporary. As to the nightmare dystopia, the societies where that was an issue, like the Mongolian empire or the Khmer Rouge, weren't close to "nobody is actually required to produce all the necessities of life". They killed millions of people either to make examples or to further profoundly evil ideological goals (like exterminating educated people).
The big thing missed is that when the necessities of life are taken care of, then new wants spring up. There is no reason to expect that our societies will run out of things to do because we won't run out of wants to fulfill.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2025, @10:11PM
I can only assume a communist had sex with your wife
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday September 07 2025, @11:01PM (2 children)
Yes, the issue though is that the jobs that have been replacing the factory, agricultural work and other work producing things have largely been in the service economy. And robotics have been advancing at an astonishing rate. There's a ton of jobs that could be done by robots that are only being done by humans because robots are still too expensive compared with what they can coerce a person into accepting as payment. That will end at some point when the robots get even less expensive than they currently are.
The result is that we can't just assume that a new class of jobs will be created to employ the people losing their jobs as there just aren't that many possibilities that can't already be automated away with just an extension of the tech we already have and that a large enough section oft eh populace could do.
It's a real question as to whether we'll get a UBI with or without a bunch of gallows being set up to start dealing with the oligarchs that have been leeching off productive people for decades.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jelizondo on Monday September 08 2025, @02:21AM (1 child)
Agree. That's the point I try to make to anyone who tries to tell me we have been here before. No, it is not the Industrial Revolution.
There has never been a time when AI and robots could be wielded to perform human tasks, except the very near future...
When people talk about "reshoring" jobs they're talking nonsense, those jobs are gone, gone and gone. If new manufacturing plants are built, they will be automated to the point where a handful of people take care of supplies, maintenance and cleaning, period. The machines actually produce the goods.
Even if they get a union, the old-style union jobs are gone. Blue collar workers will never again be middle class. They'll be janitors and handymen, sure, a few will be technicians and fewer engineers, the vast majority, just doing jobs that can't be automated just quite yet; but eventually, they will be.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday September 08 2025, @02:34AM
It's an important point. As strange as things are right now in general in the US, it's not exactly without precedent globally. Authoritarians do pop up from time to time around the world, and I'm not sure that any of what's going on is truly without any sort of parallel.
AI and robots though are at a point where they can already be able to do most of the jobs that humans can do, just not in a cost effective way. I have no idea how long until they will hit that tipping point, but given how quickly offshoring moved once it started to pick up steam, I wouldn't assume that it's going to be gradual.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by arslan on Monday September 08 2025, @01:10AM
Seriously, even before LLMs, there were loads of bad engineers with Stackoverflow copy & pasting code. AI is no different. Don't blame the tool.
If you use it properly its a good tool for coding - and NO its not suppose to replace coders or magically make bad coders good. It does help accelerate the work a little bit, which of course in the hands of a bad coder, just increases bad code output.
The author seems frustrated that he's no longer "mentoring" juniors and blaming poor corporate culture on AI. Removing AI isn't gonna solve that, its an easy target for sure.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 08 2025, @02:39AM (1 child)
The basic value of what's being advertised as AI is in computers communicating with humans and vice versa. Run an LLM on, say, a bunch of customer reviews and you'll learn useful information from that. As far as generative stuff goes, it can be a step up in sounding human versus sounding like a bot.
But that's about all it can do well. It is not and has never been a general-purpose problem solver. It does not and never has replaced human developers who understand what the f*** they are doing.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday September 08 2025, @03:47AM
But that's about all it can do well. It is not and has never been a general-purpose problem solver. It does not and never has replaced human developers who understand what the f*** they are doing.
LLMs and other forms are for managers, and since when have managers ever shown even the least amount of regard for human developers who understand what the f*** they are doing?
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by lowjax on Tuesday September 09 2025, @08:46AM (1 child)
If you get slop you feed it slop. Most people drive like shit, but ask them how awesome they are! Also note that most obsessive coders spend most their time in cursor/windsurfer and custom AI agent coding environments and tools. Obsessed over things like MCP integrations and so much more... Someone calling themselves a programmer or coder in 2025 and not using AI agents and tools like cursor/windsurfer, and especially the locally run run stuff will NOT GET HIRED ANYWHERE.
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday September 09 2025, @09:13AM
This sounds as though it was written by AI - just like your previous 3 comments.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]