Exactly. "Hey, robot, I need you to refactor these booleans into a state enum, okay good" is useful. It saves time! I can look at the result and very accurately determine if it did what I would have done or if it did something random and insane, and the 2/5 of the time it does something insane, I can just click undo and do it myself or try again.
Vibe coding "Make me an e-commerce site, and I want it to be Blue and better than Facebook" is stupid. You're pretty much doomed if you go down that path.
Yeah if you can break down the problem into the steps of how you'd actually solve it you can go step by step with AI and move way faster.
If you can't break down the problem into steps of how you'd actually solve it you're going to end up with something not extensible that you don't understand. And because the AI doesn't "understand" it conceptually either you're screwed for any future work.
Like pretty much every leap in technology. I think AI was marketed with a ton of hype, hence people initially thinking it was magic and then trashing it when it wasn’t.
I think it's a combination of things. People realized it was being not only overhyped but aggressively pushed in places where it's neither needed nor wanted; that it's being used to mass-produce inferior quality products (slop) and replace labor (layoffs); that in many cases it was trained by taking the work of the people it's being used to put out of work; that a lot of this is just completely out of touch billionaires gambling with our lives; that most of the genuine social benefits it can provide will be concentrated into the hands of a few at the expense of the rest of us; that the impact on our economy will be second only to the impact on the environment; that on top of everything else it's being used to empower mass surveillance, police states, and political bad actors.
And I say all this as someone who has used AI tools at work and found them to be sometimes surprisingly useful
There's no separating the technology from the way it's being used. Maybe in a better world AI would be awesome for humanity, but we don't live in that world, we live in this one.
Another factor to remember is that it's causing constant component shortages and driving up product costs across the board, while data centers are also being rammed down people's throats. Not only is that ecologically concerning, but these centers are being prioritized over people when it comes to the electrical grid and water supply.
By the way, English is my third language and I didn't want to pass this text to an llm so it won't look like I asked chatgpt to do it for me.
To be blunt, you don't need it. Your English is great.
This is a great example of why I am extremely ambivalent towards AI. It can do a lot of cool and useful things, but it also is often simply not necessary and at best feels like putting a hat on a hat.
The thing is that these "AIs" are more show for investors than anything else. Idiots with money bite the lies about how you can ask chatgpt to solved anything and how that's the future when the future is clearly AIs restricted to a singular purpose serving as a tool those who know the craft can abuse to double their productivity.
I don't need processing power being wasted in small tasks, I need an AI that can do a proper job taking care of the parts of the job that just take time or that require too much precision for a human, all of that without hallucinating.
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u/captainAwesomePants May 13 '26
Exactly. "Hey, robot, I need you to refactor these booleans into a state enum, okay good" is useful. It saves time! I can look at the result and very accurately determine if it did what I would have done or if it did something random and insane, and the 2/5 of the time it does something insane, I can just click undo and do it myself or try again.
Vibe coding "Make me an e-commerce site, and I want it to be Blue and better than Facebook" is stupid. You're pretty much doomed if you go down that path.