I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.

Lol, I’ve done that before in my apartment. Guessing it’s the same thing as an ammonia-bleach reaction.

I do try to give it a chance and use it every once and a while (most recently Claude Code; last year, Cursor), and it has been my experience that it personally decreases my productivity and quality. I found that even CoPilot’s autocomplete would introduce bugs if I decided to “trust” it and try to work too fast without meticulously reviewing every token generated. I have seen people I work with use AI to quickly create decent looking prototypes (i.e. bog standard, boring design), but I think this is still detrimental because they lose the full benefit of exploratory programming (and of course, the prototypes just have all kinds of faked data and functionality, glaring security problems, bad architecture). I’ve also experienced people submitting nonsense vibe-coded pull requests that would break tons of things they shouldn’t have even touched for the issue. I could see a less interested or overworked reviewer letting stuff like that through, which is why I think we’re seeing all these failures and bugs at these big tech companies. So for me, at least, I haven’t seen the benefit. Using CoPilot in VSCode actually caused me to go back to using nvim and lsp plugins :)

/rant

These are weird times. I feel like any developer who’s tried letting AI write code should recognize that it hurts productivity when you have chase down bugs in badly written code nobody on your team understands. For anything important, that will need to be maintained, less time would be spent designing, writing, and maintaining the code yourself. There are even studies showing AI hurts productivity. Yet, many developers seem to have bought the hype, and managers and investors doubly so.

AFAIK, few of these startups that tout heavy AI usage ever ship anything. The large companies that are forcing AI usage are progressively degrading their products.

Seems like the owner class is just going to keep on deluding themselves, companies are going to keep laying off, everybody is going to keep shipping shit that doesn’t work, if they ship anything at all, and investors are going to keep dumping money into businesses producing no value. The entire system has never felt so fake. At least during the dot-com bubble corporations weren’t doing mass layoffs to excite investors.

I feel like the owner class has got so powerful now, society has regressed to the point where we’re back to being ruled by dumb, delusional, psychopathic royalty imposing their will onto the masses. (Yeah, it’s kind of been that way for a long time, but it seems to be quickly getting worse).

He’s still using a Studio Ghibli pfp? I thought they asked OpenAI to stop using their style. These people are actively hostile to the idea of consent.

Will be selectively enforced and they’ll gradually tighten down over time.