A few years ago, there was potential for dirty looks coming your way if you suggested that you may be using AI for generating code. Soon, it’s going to be frowned upon to boast that you don’t use AI tools (because you’re probably wasting time).
welp I guess time to open a codeberg account
CEOs, embrace torches and pitchforks.
Copilot is shit.
I’m looking out in the street. I see a lack of torches, pitchforks, or any pressure on corporate interests.
Be the change you want to see.
You can’t point this out! People will flip the responsibility to you!
That always seems to happen. I’m too broke to buy a pitchfork, and too pyrophobic for a torch, sorry.
Be patient. Pyrrhic victories of your enemies are not to be gobbled. They are to be savoured.
Don’t worry, they’re gonna eat themselves doing shit just like this. It’s not a matter of if, but when.
“AI” has it’s uses (medicine, engineering, etc.), but 99.99% of the snake oil they’re selling are just gimmicky cash grabs. Classic cases of Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Let them burn their money, I say. Fuck it. Just sit back and enjoy the fire.
yes, but we will be burdened with the consequences somehow. we will be the ones to pay the price, as always.
Hard agree. AI is not currently at the stage that CEO’s think it’s at. A few years down the road there’s going to be a hard crash, when the problems overthrow the benefits and they realize they are just throwing money away. Sadly this also will be accompanied with a IT/Software “sinkhole” because many who were competent in the field will have moved on to the next thing as the jobs wern’t there anymore.
Something similar happened with the Nursing field during COVID, prior to the event, there was a steady if not overflow of medical professionals, but when COVID occurred they started being treated like tools, medical facilities started having to pay mad amounts of money on traveling staff that jumped from facility to facility due to it to even partially make up for it as many left the field. Jump to today, the problem still exists, an educated field like IT or nursing can’t have an event that results in tons of people leaving the profession, as you can’t just snap your finger and get that knowledge back. It will take years to regain that trust and get people back into the fields again.
I predict it will be even more somewhat lesser skilled white collar type office jobs. Like insurance adjusters and other insurance policy related jobs come to mind. AI will completely fuck this up. There will be massive lawsuits and these companies will go out of business. Same thing with other industries. Once they realize the massive fuckup they made, they will try to switch back but no one will be there available to come back. And then they are fucked. The more industries this happens to, the worse the crash will be as it affects many diverse industries. It’s a huge recipe for disasters, like Great Depression style. And with trump’s tarrifs to fan the flame, we are well on our way.
Don’t worry, until Trump gets his insurance adjusted by an LLM trained on real data about him (won’t happen), he’ll make executive orders exempting the LLM users from legal action.
also - love the Johnny Mnemonic inspired username.
it has a cascading effect, its already affecting state university in the west in enrollment, because they dont see a future in thier degree, they are either not choosing to come to a particular 4 year university, or looking at other universities in other areas.
AI is not currently at the stage that CEO’s think it’s at. A few years down the road there’s going to be a hard crash, when the problems overthrow the benefits and they realize they are just throwing money away.
I think they’re aware which is why they’re posturing with BS statements such as his. They wouldn’t need to force it on people if it were actually as good as they want people to think it is. They want to cash in now because they know the house of cards will crumble sooner than later.
This is exactly what happened to manufacturing and chip making of 40 years of “free trade”. We lack the skilled staff for these jobs.
Continuing on the nursing topic, well before covid there was a shortage of nurses, then the media blitz convinced many people to get degrees… There were so many looking for work that wages plummeted.
It’s all a shell game. The goal is to make the labor suplly huge so they can dictate wages, which they did.
They did it with programmers overthe last ten years… Now nobody can find a job.
I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!
travelling nurses seems to be the way to go, to earn bank. being a staff at a hospital or medical center doesnt seem attractive, unless your in a really backwoods state like a red one, where they let nurses fall to the cracks to be hired. Also the pandemic, people during thier university years wernt learning anything so they were also fucked from the start, since everything was online and not in person, thats why im seeing such bad reviews in universities in my area. the first 2 years is pretty much crucial to determine your strength in your degree, and then some experience, which was probably non existent during covid, like with labs and research.
Even more fun, the stock market is propped up by Nvidia and AI companies buying their chips. If AI crashes, it’s a new financial crisis. And if the market crashes, the layoffs at far were just a warmup.
they already laid off so many people, when it does crash, it will. do they expect the programmers/devs they dint fire to hold thier company over til thier next grift, with so little people.
They’ll expect that and in lot of cases fail, while China, India en EU will try buy everything for cents on the dollar. Then USA starts to lose its dominant position in digital services, what’s now a big part of the export. Or the government can panic and nationalize the whole sector. It’s not sure how things turn out, but it’ll be a weird time.
Something similar happened with the Nursing field during COVID, prior to the event, there was a steady if not overflow of medical professionals, but
What drew me to this collection of a full sentence and another fragment spliced in wasn’t the comma splice: it was the perfect example of beggaring the question.
I’m still not sure whether the bad writing was accidental or an attempt to divert from the false premise.
At no time has there been sufficient medical staff.
Copilot is shit
Yes and no. I find its terrible at solving more complex problems but its great at writing out tests for a function/view that covers every flow. My team went from having like 40% (shit) coverage to every PR having every case tested (inb4 they’re not good tests, they are good)
With that being said, fuck CEOs and fuck AI.
Copilot is shit.
Exactly, my company provides license for copilot and I use it, and while it has some highlights most of the time it actually is more a nuisance than help.
It especially annoys me because it hijacks autocomplete based on types with is own that frequently has subtle bugs, so now if I have it enabled I need to be on guard all the time. With the traditional autocomplete I could just trust it to be correct.
You have to put it in Ask mode so it doesn’t touch your code also ChatGPT models are free so if you want to ring up an AI bill use the Claude and Sonnet models.
This is my experience. It saves a bit of typing sometimes but that’s probably cancelled out by the time spent correcting it, rewriting nonsense it produced, and reviewing my corworkers PRs that didn’t notice the nonsense.
Here’s where I’ll give it credit:
- It can spit out a beautiful readme.md file
- It will insert comments to explain the more nuanced aspects of my code for those viewing it for the first time
Doesn’t make up for the annoying-ass auto complete hijacking though. Stupid thing keeps making up non-existent functions and api’s and inserting them all over the place.
You can turn off the copilot autocomplete in the ide and JUST use agent/edit/ask mode
I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.
To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.
It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.
The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.
Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.
We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.
For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.
Wow that rant blew up.
Your point about music is a great analogy. Basically:
- People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
- Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
- Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
- Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
- Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.
See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.
Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?
Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”
Tell me you’ve never written a song without telling me you’ve never written a song…
Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.
I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’
Yep, autotune rappers have been pushed for years, and I always suspected it’s to make the transition to AI music easier.
Embrace? With so many devs constantly being laid off, how about NO?
I don’t get it. AI is a tool. My CEO didn’t care about what tools I use, as long as I get the job done. Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done? They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.
Return? No, there is no return on investment from AI. If there really was a return to be had from Devs, you wouldn’t have to force them to use it.
This is a saving face and covering their asses exercise. Option 1 is “We spent the money, nobody’s using it, the bubbles gonna burst”, the other choice is “if we can ramp up the usage numbers before the earnings call, we can get some of that sweet investor money to buy us out of being mauled by our shareholders”.
It’s shitty management, making shitty decisions to cover up their previous shitty decisions
That’s the point though. These CEOs don’t know that there is not going to be an “AI revolution”. They all think they are getting in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook. They genuinely believe that these “AI’s” are going to revolutionize the Internet.
That’s exactly why Elmo went from “AI is too dangerous and development on it must be stopped” to “I’m gonna built the best AI ever and I’ll call it Grok cause I want everyone to think I’m a relatable sci-fi nerd.”
I don’t think these CEOs have quite figured out that LLM developers are creating something that can more easily replace a CEO than a developer.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees
Honestly I’ve been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot ‘assisted’ all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.
loads of self hosted alternatives if you so require it
I am surprised they aren’t embracing it… I would. You immediately get some vague non person to blame all your failures on.
Employers aren’t loyal enough for the average person to care about their companies well being.
I agree, let them generate massive tech debt cause right now the majority of my current clients have hired me to clean up their AI slop.
is it bad for their users? oh hell yes it is. Is it great for me an other consultants/freelancers? hell yes it is. Best thing that’s ever happened to my wallet recently are vibe coders. I love those dumb prompt monkeys.
They all need to be sued for unethical “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” practices again
best I can do is rusty dull guillotine
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).
Snake oil is also not entirely bad. The placebo effect actually works.
No, snake oil is extremely bad. It’s a highly exploitative practice that preys on the desperation of sick people.
That’s what “snake oil” refers to. Exploiting someone by playing their emotions.
The placebo effect actually works.
The placebo effect sometimes works. But only in very specific circumstances. A placebo will not cure cancer or heart disease.
It can help with things related to pain, as mental and emotional state can directly affect the severity of pain. And a placebo can sometimes marginally improve symptoms by reducing stress levels. But that’s why placebos are used during drug trials. If a drug produces the same results as a placebo, then it doesn’t work. And that says a lot about what the placebo effect actually is. It’s just a mental state change that gets expressed as reduced physiological stress.
snake oil made me sssssssick (yes the dad jokes are weak today)
It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.
If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.
tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care
Alternatively, following their logic, keep the number of people and achieve massively higher productivity. But they don’t want that, they want to reduce the number of people having opinions and diluting the share pool, because its not about productivity, its about exerting control.
Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?
Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going
Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.
OK, cya.
I can already tell the guy is a huge fan of cheeto prez.
I’m a professional developer and have tested AI tools extensively over the last few years as they develop. The economic implications of the advancements made over the last few months are simply impossible to ignore. The tools aren’t perfect, and you certainly need to structure their use around their strengths and weaknesses, but assigned to the right tasks they can be 10% or less of the cost with better results. I’ve yet to have a project where I’ve used them and they didn’t need an experienced engineer to jump in and research an obscure or complex bug, have a dumb architectural choice rejected, or verify if stuff actually works (they like reporting success when they shouldn’t), but again the economics; the dev can be doing other stuff 90% of the time.
Don’t get me wrong, on the current trajectory this tech would probably lead to deeply terrible socioeconomic outcomes, probably techno neofeudalism, but for an individual developer putting food on the table I don’t see it as much of a choice. It’s like the industrial revolution again, but for cognitive work.
I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.
I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.
I’m finding AI effectively automates entry level jobs and interns. The long term implications is very few will be able to enter the field. What do we do when all the experienced engineers retire? How will we shift our economy to work for everyone under this model?
such an easy choice …
(edit: I followed up and got out. This too is now self-hosted and codeberg when needed)
I like Codeberg better anyways.
I like the idea of it; yet you can’t host private repos. I don’t want to be locked in to GitHub but as someone starting their career it’s important to show that you’re working on stuff. Hence I worry that moving away from GitHub will negatively impact my interviewing prospects.
You can with some caveats. It has to be stuff like configs or a project you intend to make FOSS later.
I’ve never had a job check my GitHub, but I could give Codeberg too.
Funny thing to say after using their code to train the shitty-ass AI. Developers don’t need AI, but AI certainly needs developers.
AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems… A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.
AI can’t run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems… The list of supporting characters is long.
What if we… Just… Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?
Daily reminder that Codeberg is always the good alternative to corporate bastards like this idiot
Threatening remarks like that are why I learned PHPUnit, and yeah it made me become a better developer, but often times these are just empty statements.
AI is just another tool in my toolbox, but it’s not everything.
You can always count on the ceos of smaller companies that are owned by larger mega corporations to tell it to ya straight with no bias
Especially when Microsoft said for employees AI is no longer optional.
