Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years.
The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.
Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).
If all crypto can only be broken by a machine that can itself only be made by 3 companies all of which are very careful about who they sell to, we get a few governments spying on everyone (including each other), while keeping normal criminal hacking (and insufficiently important governments) locked out.
> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic.
Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.
Can we please stop the relatability theater from people like this?
If I had a dollar for everyone's cookie cutter linkedin:
> Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. I strategize with it. I build products with it. I write with it. I analyze data with it. But even I feel like everyone else has cracked the AI code while I’m still using some basic tutorial version over here.
followed by some trivial or lukewarm take.. Yes. People are lying like their careers and lives depend on it. But no one cares about some person who doesn't look like they've built anything in their entire life.
What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using.
> Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.
But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.
That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.
> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"
My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.
I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap:
interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
The biggest benefit for me has been getting side projects done. Little bugs or todos that would take more time than I have to spare, but don’t detract from the project.
I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value.
Same here. Little side projects and convenience tooling for $day_job that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten built for lack of time. Doesn’t need to be perfect, beautiful code for an audience of one. It just needs to work.
> The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy.
This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.
Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.
It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle.
First, we have this section:
But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Then immediately after:
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.
(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 start reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it
Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.
"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.
By that definition, any form of philosophy or politics is based on the one basis of the universe - Marketing.
It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something.
To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think it should be highly regulated.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.
Marketing is human nature. I personally use adblockers to avoid it. But if we erased the memory of "marketing" from human consciousness it would soon be rediscovered independently anyhow.
The difference being that this site is built for this kind of exchange, and parent poster is engaging exactly in the way it is designed for.
A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.
it's true. persuasion is the immoral core of marketing. personally i believe everyone should hate persuasion too but nobody will listen to me when i try to compel them!
I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?
Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.
Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
Exactly that. Their job is to manipulate me into believing I need something that has never missed in my life - enough for me to trade my own health (in the form of work hours, which I exchange for money) for it. Literally trying to convince me that a thing I never wanted or needed is worth dying a little in exchange for it.
A plumber puts an ad in the paper / Google for their services in your area. This makes you aware of their services. This is marketing their services to you. By seeing the ad, are you manipulated into using their services?
Scroll back up and notice most of these comments are distinguishing "marketing" from "marketers". I think a lot of people also wouldn't consider just an ad as marketing without some further details (such as the comment you replied to).
Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.
I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.
> Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
Yeah, this is just absurd. From the other side, probably marketers wonder how anyone implements these incredibly user hostile interfaces to make it hard for people to cancel, and how anyone could work on products such as Google and Facebook (even as they use them for work).
It's easy to scapegoat a group you're not part of, but it's generally not correct. Things are more complicated than you imagine.
> Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers.
I guess if "Being good enough that people recommend it to others" is marketing, then yeah I suppose I'd agree. But when people talk "marketing", they generally refer to outbound one, and we could easily live without that and still find products, just like we did before "marketing" was the pest it's identified as today.
With that said, everyone believes they're a good person, every single individual on the planet probably, within their reality and their perspective. Including marketers, unbelievable as it sounds.
Ever wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart?
They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.
It strikes me as sort of civil society “arms dealer” type of role, like lawyers. In a utopia where everyone cooperated in good faith and behaved honorably we would not need them (or very few of them), but as soon as one group arms themselves, everyone must regardless of their feelings about it. Then the marketers become an interest group unto themselves and stoke the paranoia of everyone who might need their services, and the endless escalation eats away at the underlying system turning it into more noise than signal.
There’s a name for this right? Marketers that discredit free markets, lawyers that ruin the law, accountants w bank on loopholes, social services that thrive without a social safety net, the lobbyists of democracy, what else? Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame, but the others?
> Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame
Why single out sex workers here? I understand the other examples, but unless you're talking about sex workers tricking people/robbing them or something else, it seems like a service-profession like any other, like a cleaner or what not, but I'm guessing you wouldn't actually put 'Actual mercenaries and cleaners kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame'.
I think a mix match of perverse incentives, rent-seeking, cobra effect, regulatory capture and institutional corruption all together lead to the inevitable situation of institutions or professions whose incentives depend on the persistence (or even worsening of) the problem it claims to solve.
So no single term, for something so widespread, must be taboo to talk about, or too risky to address, and threaten the social status of someone connected to the uglier side of a profession.
Of course I didn’t “single out” anyone, but you got that.
That infantile in its reductionism. There is a degree and kind to which marketing is a significant net benefit; word-of-mouth is not an effective way of getting people to learn about most products, even if it is exactly what they need and they would benefit from it. We are seeing things taken to a level which is extremely destructive and harmful, but your broad statement is juvenile and idiotic.
I have no trouble imagining how you can sleep at night — the world must be so simple to you.
I wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.
I wish the performance , achievements , honour , praise , and disdain we hold for people would be evaluated based on this instead of PR and Puff pieces.
Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .
you just replied to a comment with your website less than 2 weeks ago. and you are running a banner with a discount on your website where you also solicit testimonials.
Just to be clear I think there is a difference between saying "there are systemic issues in the way some businesses market and sell that sometimes are harmful to the public good, violate ethical and moral boundaries, and we should try to fix perverse incentives and regulate bad behavior" and "marketing is evil and we think it's funny to post videos suggesting they all commit suicide."
It’s part of my identity? Nobody is going to see those letters, google them, find my products, and buy them. To call it marketing is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity.
The entire idea that you can’t even in passing mention something you spend all day every day working on, because then it’s “marketing” is exactly the sort of consequence which leads to so many of is loathing marketing as an industry.
Marketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil.
There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.
There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:
It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.
The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation
Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity people finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of people with a very specific kind of technical interest. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.
There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube.
But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.
I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.
In which they put a bold faced text overlay across the thumbnail and make sure to include at least one algospeak self-censorship asterisk („sh*t“). Bonus points if the word wasn’t even a curse word.
I mean, many channels like CNBC already looked like that before ChatGPT was invented, stretching a 3min "explainer" video with unnecessary background story and "expert interviews" that serve no purpose, so much that I just go through comments in hope that someone has summarized it for me.
let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.
how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?
it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”
Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.
I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.
With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.
The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.
Dunning Kruger springs to mind.
Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.
Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.
This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.
After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.
In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).
It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.
I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.
But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.
I separate my learning into “understanding/” and “skill”, the latter being the applied form of the former. I don’t really buy books for the latter, and the former may not be always in book form.
IE6 hacks are skills. The real understanding is how CSS helps with layout. Grid may not be in an old book, but the old will give you enough foundation to easily grasp it. So something like “CSS in Depth”[0] (which talks about grid BTW) is a good candidate to buy.
I think you can get good materials if you focus on getting books that talks about a system (design, theory, implementation), not techniques(skills, how to). Systems evolve and are build on top of each other, or influence each other. Skills come and go.
Probably not, it just re-baselines. Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money. If the time resource isn't changing and the effort isn't changing but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled you're getting more joy from each dollar scammed instead of just substance.
It may make pity scams less effective though so I'd expect the implementation to change to focus more on creating urgency and less on altruism.
> Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money.
The prospect of not being able to pay for food or rent carries a desperation that isn't there when not being able to buy a video game or hire a Hooker :)
Maybe with hard drug addiction, but that's a different societal problem to tackle.
> but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled
If fewer people are chronically -desperate- for money, it could leave a smaller workforce pool available to scammers for "hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks" or "paying people to leave 5 star reviews" etc
There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans.
I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.
Elena is one of those people who was loudest about AI on other channels and now she writes this when, as you say, there’s a demand for articles like this.
It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.
i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
as a note, i found this particularly funny:
"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.
> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
>i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Surely you're kidding right?
You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.
The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.
I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.
Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.
FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.
LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012
- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around
- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)
- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)
- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)
That's just off the top of my head.
I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?
a ton of people have chimed in with how certain software has changed their life, and honestly, if it was in a positive way, i am happy for you. my post is not intended to imply that you can't consider a specific piece of software to have changed your life.
i should have italicized the "i" in my post, to emphasize that it is a personal opinion. and perhaps i should have provided a bar for what i consider to be "life changing". that was my bad.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.
This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.
That's good to hear. I do think you should benefit more from the increased value created, but it sounds like it's actually made a significant difference to you.
Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with others.
For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.
Like all popular things in our culture there has to be people who point out it's all hype or fake marketing or overrated or not a big deal. That's always a safe position to take and a reliable way to get attention
A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.
The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.
The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).
But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.
Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.
I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most code bases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.
If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested black box, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.
I like to imagine a similar dynamic happening when previous transformative technologies were invented: when the power tools like the chainsaw were invented, I wonder if there was a cohort of carpenters that dismissed them because of how much damage they could do in unskilled hands.
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?
There are several other examples that come to mind, of prolific and respected developers turning to AI-based workflow and ever since then just constantly producing mediocre content and code. The spark is gone, the taste, the genius - whatever you call it, the human quality that made them interesting in the first place. Sure they're more productive, but they all sound the same now. Any other decent dev with access to a corporate code-generation service can get basically the same result.
This is a good observation. Antirez is one my favorite authors and software developers. I'm 100% sure he could have made the same Redis PR and ds4 (or something else) without LLMs in about the same time with the same quality or higher.
False dichotomy much? The tools can be force multiplying without being “100x productivity boosting,” which I’ve never once heard claimed except from critics.
> Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
You could say that AI turned them from stupid and lazy to the famously dangerous combination of stupid and hardworking.
> we're living in an increasingly deranged society
There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.
In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down.
> They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code
If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?
Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.
The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.
If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.
I am not forced to use it, but I am a peculiar type of dev. Very lazy. Can go for weeks without producing anything of value while I think of stuff, delete stuff and generally just cogitate. I would work for 3-5 hours if I could but I have to sit in a chair for 8 hours to please the pointy haired people.
My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.
I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.
I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.
Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society.
It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.
People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.
Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.
No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.
Ending ZIRP right near the crest of the current AI wave has done irreparable damage to the discourse. Businesses take time to actually adapt to new technology, but for some reason everyone believed every sluggish, giant corporation when they did the thing they always do and tried to put a positive spin on their layoffs. I am obligated to point out that using AI as an excuse for tech layoffs has occurred since long before these models could do anything useful.
I actually do believe that AI has profoundly negatively impacted the software engineering job market, though, but not by reducing the number of jobs per se. I think so far the most impactful thing it actually did was destroy the job interview and flood literally every single channel with AI generated crap, making it much harder to even get a foot in the door.
Meanwhile, for all the hooplah of layoffs, we still haven't seen a year with more tech layoffs than 2023, the year after ZIRP ended in the U.S.; then in 2024 and 2025, it went flat, to "bad but certainly not unprecedented" levels.
Working with modern AI tooling, I find it to be very impressive. Hard-to-ignore impressive. It does give you the nagging feeling that some day, you won't be needed. I mean, let's face it: most people knew deep down that there couldn't be anything that special going on in a human brain that mimicking it would be categorically impossible; I think we just aren't sure exactly what the threshold will be where we aren't needed. The reason why the goalposts keep moving is because we genuinely never interrogated the different ways in which we bring value, so we don't even know what AI needs to be able to do to fully replace us at our jobs. We're starting to get an idea, though.
Yet I've even had Claude Fable go into a death spiral that it seems unable to recover from on its own. I've seen Opus 4.7 with a fairly intricate harness completely and utterly fail to triage an issue down to the root cause and instead just make things up. I've seen GPT 5.5 insist repeatedly that there was no bug and that the tests must be wrong. Personally, I've gotten the feeling that the current AI architecture asymptotically approaches a point where it can truly replace humans but never quite gets there because it just gets stuck in a ditch too often.
But obviously we would need less people with AI... Probably? Yet, I'm not even sure that's true yet. Why?
Well I mean, I've seen the rise of actually useful LLMs across two jobs now and both times it's still been a struggle to reliably hit sprints and quarterly rocks. Not only that, I have observed that while AI is capable of enabling non-programmers to do very impressive programming work, a thing that actually brings me much joy given that I don't believe being able to construct programs should be some elitist thing for people who spent their lives on it, I have also noticed that it is ridiculously easy to completely discount the value that a skilled, experienced programmer still brings when driving an LLM. Seriously. And I've began to notice patterns; a lot of people go for cheap models and tokenmax, but senior engineers are more choosey, especially opting for frontier models and higher thinking when it comes to code review. And they're much better at filtering out the noise quickly without dropping serious, substantial issues that are just very tricky to understand.
With all of this in mind, I absolutely believe that some companies really are now, in 2026, laying off programmers because of AI. But I think they are just jumping the gun onto a fad and making a huge, stupid mistake. If you were really doing this right, you would do that after you found yourself in the situation where you truly didn't need the capacity, and not in anticipation of no longer needing it. And I'm guessing like most organizations, a lot of these organizations laying people off are still not reliably hitting their goals, and even i...
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] threadThe problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.
Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
If all crypto can only be broken by a machine that can itself only be made by 3 companies all of which are very careful about who they sell to, we get a few governments spying on everyone (including each other), while keeping normal criminal hacking (and insufficiently important governments) locked out.
And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.
Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.
Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.
But yeah it‘s going to be a skill that will be important for datacenters.
If I had a dollar for everyone's cookie cutter linkedin:
> Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. I strategize with it. I build products with it. I write with it. I analyze data with it. But even I feel like everyone else has cracked the AI code while I’m still using some basic tutorial version over here.
followed by some trivial or lukewarm take.. Yes. People are lying like their careers and lives depend on it. But no one cares about some person who doesn't look like they've built anything in their entire life.
> Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.
But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.
I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is.
Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.
That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.
If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"
interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value.
This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.
Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.
First, we have this section:
But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Then immediately after:
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.
(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something.
To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.
A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.
Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.
Yeah, this is just absurd. From the other side, probably marketers wonder how anyone implements these incredibly user hostile interfaces to make it hard for people to cancel, and how anyone could work on products such as Google and Facebook (even as they use them for work).
It's easy to scapegoat a group you're not part of, but it's generally not correct. Things are more complicated than you imagine.
I guess if "Being good enough that people recommend it to others" is marketing, then yeah I suppose I'd agree. But when people talk "marketing", they generally refer to outbound one, and we could easily live without that and still find products, just like we did before "marketing" was the pest it's identified as today.
With that said, everyone believes they're a good person, every single individual on the planet probably, within their reality and their perspective. Including marketers, unbelievable as it sounds.
They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.
Why single out sex workers here? I understand the other examples, but unless you're talking about sex workers tricking people/robbing them or something else, it seems like a service-profession like any other, like a cleaner or what not, but I'm guessing you wouldn't actually put 'Actual mercenaries and cleaners kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame'.
I think a mix match of perverse incentives, rent-seeking, cobra effect, regulatory capture and institutional corruption all together lead to the inevitable situation of institutions or professions whose incentives depend on the persistence (or even worsening of) the problem it claims to solve.
Of course I didn’t “single out” anyone, but you got that.
I have no trouble imagining how you can sleep at night — the world must be so simple to you.
Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .
The entire idea that you can’t even in passing mention something you spend all day every day working on, because then it’s “marketing” is exactly the sort of consequence which leads to so many of is loathing marketing as an industry.
There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.
Ironically Bill smoked like a chimney and for that we can also largely thank marketers.
But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.
I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.
how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?
it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”
Trigger warning. Could not finish that sentence.
1) cool people do cool things
2) chill people do enjoy and spread the word
3) posers get wind and the scene takes a dive but reaches critical mass
4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers
5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs
It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.
Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.
With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.
The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.
Dunning Kruger springs to mind.
Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.
Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.
This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.
After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.
In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.
But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.
IE6 hacks are skills. The real understanding is how CSS helps with layout. Grid may not be in an old book, but the old will give you enough foundation to easily grasp it. So something like “CSS in Depth”[0] (which talks about grid BTW) is a good candidate to buy.
I think you can get good materials if you focus on getting books that talks about a system (design, theory, implementation), not techniques(skills, how to). Systems evolve and are build on top of each other, or influence each other. Skills come and go.
[0] https://www.manning.com/books/css-in-depth
It may make pity scams less effective though so I'd expect the implementation to change to focus more on creating urgency and less on altruism.
The prospect of not being able to pay for food or rent carries a desperation that isn't there when not being able to buy a video game or hire a Hooker :)
Maybe with hard drug addiction, but that's a different societal problem to tackle.
> but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled
If fewer people are chronically -desperate- for money, it could leave a smaller workforce pool available to scammers for "hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks" or "paying people to leave 5 star reviews" etc
I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.
Sure, HN has changed over time, but this tends to be a place where people field technical questions and get technical answers.
It’s marketers doing marketing all the way down.
i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
as a note, i found this particularly funny:
"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."
I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.
> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
Every software purchase process I have been involved in I have asked the vendor to demonstrate their claims against our requirements.
With AI, I am expected to defend myself from claims that my requirements are wrong.
For context
Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.
I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!
I think the combination of web server and web browser comes close.
Surely you're kidding right?
You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.
Magic is real. We are f***ing wizards.
You seem a little full of yourself. (That’s putting it charitably. You seem full of shit.)
I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.
The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.
I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.
Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.
FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.
LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.
Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...
- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012
- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around
- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)
- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)
- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)
That's just off the top of my head.
I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?
i should have italicized the "i" in my post, to emphasize that it is a personal opinion. and perhaps i should have provided a bar for what i consider to be "life changing". that was my bad.
Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.
This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.
(I'm unaffiliated with them.)
For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.
A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.
The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.
The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).
But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.
Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.
I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most code bases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.
If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested black box, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.
I like to imagine a similar dynamic happening when previous transformative technologies were invented: when the power tools like the chainsaw were invented, I wonder if there was a cohort of carpenters that dismissed them because of how much damage they could do in unskilled hands.
[1] https://x.com/antirez/status/2058808933309927877
You could say that AI turned them from stupid and lazy to the famously dangerous combination of stupid and hardworking.
There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.
In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down.
If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?
Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.
The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.
If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.
You think this a clever gotcha but it's not because no one was generating PRs before LLMs.
My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.
I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.
I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.
Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
It is not. It can shortcut only because it had been done before.
Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.
No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.
My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years.
I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.
I actually do believe that AI has profoundly negatively impacted the software engineering job market, though, but not by reducing the number of jobs per se. I think so far the most impactful thing it actually did was destroy the job interview and flood literally every single channel with AI generated crap, making it much harder to even get a foot in the door.
Meanwhile, for all the hooplah of layoffs, we still haven't seen a year with more tech layoffs than 2023, the year after ZIRP ended in the U.S.; then in 2024 and 2025, it went flat, to "bad but certainly not unprecedented" levels.
Working with modern AI tooling, I find it to be very impressive. Hard-to-ignore impressive. It does give you the nagging feeling that some day, you won't be needed. I mean, let's face it: most people knew deep down that there couldn't be anything that special going on in a human brain that mimicking it would be categorically impossible; I think we just aren't sure exactly what the threshold will be where we aren't needed. The reason why the goalposts keep moving is because we genuinely never interrogated the different ways in which we bring value, so we don't even know what AI needs to be able to do to fully replace us at our jobs. We're starting to get an idea, though.
Yet I've even had Claude Fable go into a death spiral that it seems unable to recover from on its own. I've seen Opus 4.7 with a fairly intricate harness completely and utterly fail to triage an issue down to the root cause and instead just make things up. I've seen GPT 5.5 insist repeatedly that there was no bug and that the tests must be wrong. Personally, I've gotten the feeling that the current AI architecture asymptotically approaches a point where it can truly replace humans but never quite gets there because it just gets stuck in a ditch too often.
But obviously we would need less people with AI... Probably? Yet, I'm not even sure that's true yet. Why?
Well I mean, I've seen the rise of actually useful LLMs across two jobs now and both times it's still been a struggle to reliably hit sprints and quarterly rocks. Not only that, I have observed that while AI is capable of enabling non-programmers to do very impressive programming work, a thing that actually brings me much joy given that I don't believe being able to construct programs should be some elitist thing for people who spent their lives on it, I have also noticed that it is ridiculously easy to completely discount the value that a skilled, experienced programmer still brings when driving an LLM. Seriously. And I've began to notice patterns; a lot of people go for cheap models and tokenmax, but senior engineers are more choosey, especially opting for frontier models and higher thinking when it comes to code review. And they're much better at filtering out the noise quickly without dropping serious, substantial issues that are just very tricky to understand.
With all of this in mind, I absolutely believe that some companies really are now, in 2026, laying off programmers because of AI. But I think they are just jumping the gun onto a fad and making a huge, stupid mistake. If you were really doing this right, you would do that after you found yourself in the situation where you truly didn't need the capacity, and not in anticipation of no longer needing it. And I'm guessing like most organizations, a lot of these organizations laying people off are still not reliably hitting their goals, and even i...