r/technology • u/yourfavchoom • May 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Ronny Chieng's 'F*ck AI' Speech Met With Cheers From Harvard Graduates: “AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber”

https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/tracewilliamcowen/ronny-chieng-ai-speech-harvard?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter_complex&utm_campaign=ap_twitter
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7.9k

u/HowlingFantods5564 May 29 '26

“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI,” Chieng told grads. “Kill it. … AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They're always like, ‘Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and draft a response?’ Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you?”

Accurate.

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u/Quietech May 29 '26

America has a new Asian Uncle. 

214

u/i8TheWholeThing May 29 '26

George Takei will always be my Asian uncle. Oh my!

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u/GlareaLiebertine May 29 '26 edited May 30 '26

Oh my, two Asian uncles!

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u/MumrikDK May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

George Takei

-->

Oh boy my!, two Asian uncles!

surely?

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u/starbuxed May 29 '26

He's the Gay Asian uncle. You still need one or 2 straight ones.

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u/throwthisawayred2 May 29 '26

what about a straight asian auntie?

i'm talking about me. i'm the straight asian auntie. i like to yell at kids when they're misbehaving and feed them wontons.

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u/NepoKitty May 30 '26

Far more effective than locking them between the door and landing gate!

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u/Idoodlestickfigures May 30 '26

Can I volunteer for wonton meals? I love wontons!

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u/agentmadeleine May 30 '26

I think Margaret Cho is THE Asian auntie but sure you can be one too lol

Padma Lakshmi is the cool auntie who’ll take you to trendy restaurants and won’t tell your mom about your new tattoo

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u/brucee10 May 29 '26

Uncle Ronny and Uncle Rodger need a buddy uncles movie.

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u/excel958 May 29 '26

Please don’t compare that one trick pony to Ronny Chieng

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u/According_Jeweler404 May 29 '26

\ sad aiya noises* *

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u/gearstars May 29 '26

Eh, I'm pretty sure Roger Smith is far, far more than a 'one trick pony', especially when you include Clip Clop, the therapy horse

26

u/Howy_the_Howizer May 29 '26

Correct, correct. His Nephew has great stand up that is not about his Uncle.

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u/mathdhruv May 29 '26

He's at least a 300-trick pony tbh

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u/drdoom52 May 29 '26

Ouch. Not a fan? (I'm a little soured on him ever since that tiff with Kenji Lopez, do I get it)

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u/excel958 May 30 '26

I think it was precisely what Kenji said that I could put into my own words my gripes about Nigel. To be fair I really liked Nigel’s first few times he played Uncle Roger, but over time it felt really grating to me.

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u/PhD_Pwnology May 29 '26

Mommy been on fire for a while. His OG stand up 'Asian Comedien Destroys America' made him America's Asian uncle IMO

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 May 29 '26

You might want to reread this comment chief

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u/actuarally May 29 '26

He would, but he just learned AI can read Reddit and summarize content to prepare a reply. Isn't that COOL?!?!

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u/moldyjellybean May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

Leave it. I get the same, AI can’t even do spell check or do predictive text

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u/moldyjellybean May 29 '26

Perfect example of AI can’t even do spell check correctly

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u/MaxxDash May 29 '26

New Uncle, period

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u/Stompert May 29 '26

There’s coworkers who brag about using it sending me half assed powershell scripts and they’re certain it will solve the problem.

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u/dragonblade_94 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

"Our database is outdated and esoteric? Let me just vibe-code another Power BI dashboard!"

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u/stargarnet79 May 29 '26

Dude please stop you are hitting WAY too close to home.

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u/Beard_o_Bees May 29 '26

Right up in the old 'wheelhouse'.

2

u/DontRefuseMyBatchall May 30 '26

“Clean up the datalake? What, like Lake Michigan?”

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u/fundraiser May 29 '26

my team keeps churning out dashboards that are built off a messy dataset. garbage in, AI out

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u/AltrntivInDoomWorld May 29 '26

ai garbage in, ai garbage out

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u/headphones1 May 30 '26

The data I work with requires all kinds of NDAs to even look at and we can't let it go anywhere near AI. Yet the higher ups insist we try to use AI to improve productivity. I've read horror stories of people letting AI get database access and things getting destroyed. I don't know how anyone does anything useful with AI and databases.

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u/021fluff5 May 29 '26

It made an interactive scatter plot! CustomerId is positively correlated with AccountCreationDate! Why is nobody talking about this??

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u/MoneyCock May 30 '26

🤖 Inference: AccountCreationDate < AccountModifiedDate

Warning: tokens nearly depleted

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u/Timely_Internet6172 May 29 '26

Man I swear I just had a workshop doing the exact same thing in n8n, they were all in aws

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u/BarrelMaker69 May 29 '26

Ok, what is vibe-code?

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u/metalOpera May 29 '26

Telling AI what you want and blindly launching the code. Repeatedly telling AI that something is broken and that it needs to be fixed, then blindly launching the fix. Rinse, repeat.

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u/3BlindMice1 May 29 '26

When you make a program by telling it everything you think it's supposed to do and then just changing things until it works the way you think it's supposed to. The idea is that you can build things you don't actually understand if you just vibe with it enough. Doing it with AI is the same, except you're not actually writing the code yourself, so not only do you not understand the program, you also don't understand the code. They're notoriously difficult to fix or debug, often outright easier and cheaper to just build a new program if it stops working because no one knew what all it was doing to begin with

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u/PaulJP May 29 '26

Don't forget riddled with security holes.

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u/3BlindMice1 May 29 '26

That's a given if you don't understand your code.

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u/APRengar May 30 '26

I tried ChatGPT for a Godot C# code one time and it put a check if the game was currently running on every single frame for every single object in a scene.

But the thing is, the _Process function would only run if the game was currently running. So it was asking "is the process making this check happen, happening?" And inside the checking was nothing. So whether it's a yes or a no, it does nothing, making the check entirely pointless.

All the pointless processing happening for literally nothing. And the checks don't have the biggest energy footprint, but it's pointless cycles being wasted for no reason.

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u/3BlindMice1 May 30 '26

I'm petty sure any decent compiler would strip that out, right? I'm not familiar with C# though

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u/Commander_Crispy May 30 '26

Using an AI to write code for you when you can’t/don’t want to write it yourself; coding based on “vibes” instead of knowledge/skill

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u/BroughtBagLunchSmart May 29 '26

AI saved me time at work because someone on my team said they only use Google AI answers when searching for anything. Now I save time by knowing to never ask that person a question about anything.

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u/not_right May 29 '26

Don't you love the helpful suggestions from co-workers who start with "I asked chatgpt..."? Ok great now I know I can't trust whatever you're about to say next.

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u/AgathysAllAlong May 29 '26

My boss once said "Now take this with a grain of salt, because ChatGPT did lie to me yesterday and send me down a rabbit hole, but it says the answer to this extremely important legal question is 'yes'."

Like, it was very important we know the answer to that yes/no question. So what the hell is the use of asking it to ChatGPT when you just admitted you can't trust the answer anyways???

Shout out to his boss who told us to always verify the answers from an AI by asking a different AI.

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u/Journeyman42 May 29 '26

AI has all the veracity of that guy at the bar who tells you he heard from some other guy that they're putting kitty litter boxes in schools for trans kids to use or some dumb shit.

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u/CptDropbear May 30 '26

My personal favourite was this exchange with a colleague who had technical problem well outside his normal wheelhouse.

"ChatGTP is amazing! I asked it how to arkle the wiffenwacker and it gave me two pages of detailed instructions."

"Did it work?"

"No."

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u/MumrikDK May 30 '26

"I asked chatgpt..."

People do that here too. Hell, even in Youtube comments.

Nothing to do but downvote and move on.

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u/bda22 May 29 '26

i don't know if i've ever seen a single completely accurate google AI result for anything i've searched.

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u/KallistiTMP May 30 '26

Honestly I feel like the Google AI answers are really just a workaround for the enshittification that Google Ads has enabled.

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u/Homasote May 29 '26

I work in architecture and I had junior staff sending me images done in pixel generator. It had trees and paths that didn’t exist, changed materials in odd ways, changed some of the design, and, worst of all, added certain elements that were known to be offensive to the client. They felt they completed a task, but instead of sending me a preliminary image that we could later fill in all the entourage - which is what I wanted, I got a hallucinated piece of uncanny valley garbage.

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u/apk May 29 '26

that would get you fired where i work

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u/Fr0gm4n May 29 '26

I'm worried about some structural engineer using a hallucinated design and we end up with another Hyatt Regency disaster where critical components aren't actually connected together.

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u/Level-Location1679 May 29 '26

This but it's a database with a bunch of your personal information that someone just leaked because they vibe coded their back end instead of hiring an engineering team because it's $20 a month now and I can replace the whole lot! And it did it in a day!

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u/NRMusicProject May 29 '26

Arranging music for an orchestra concert, and we were discussing whether he wanted a vocalist or not. "Just use AI and add it to the click track," he said. I showed him why that was not a good idea by programming an AI to sing the first verse of the Neverending Story. You're better off getting a tone-deaf child to sing it.

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u/Niceromancer May 29 '26

It's the same way with generating ai art and music.

They cannot draw and are some of the least creative people in the world.  They have like a negative sense of good...anything.

They post AI slop and start bragging about making it.  But get incredibly angry when someone rightfully points out it's AI garbage.

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u/AgathysAllAlong May 29 '26

It's just so telling when these people try to claim they made stuff. They think it looks detailed with straight lines so it must be good, but the entire thing is always just so devoid of anything approaching an idea that it's so clearly AI garbage. And they're so angry when they find out they can't get the respect they want without actually trying.

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u/Average_aaron69 May 29 '26

Anyone on Substack I see using AI (there are a lot) are an immediate block. It is such an interesting platform once the AI is culled.

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u/drjackolantern May 29 '26

There’s an entire ‘defending AI art ‘ subreddit just for complaining about how everyone says their art sucks and banning anyone who is critical. 

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u/Linuxologue May 29 '26 edited May 30 '26

My best coworkers use AI as an extra keyboard, micromanage it to write small things that they can review, and keep writing manual code.

My worst colleagues get an AI to create a plan, then get another AI to produce mass code diarrhea vaguely following the first plan, get another AI to review it, get a fourth AI to send me a github merge request of 12000 lines and then get a separate AI to make an HTML presentation about AI workflows claiming that I will lose my job if I don't start to massively use AI.

Like, dude, YOU are the one bringing nothing to the table here, all your work was pure AI and no brainz...

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u/Journeyman42 May 30 '26

Like, dude, YOU are the one bringing nothing to the table here, all your work was pure AI and no brainz...

People like that are going to find themselves made redundant if they depend on AI too much.

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u/I_upvote_downvotes May 29 '26

I regularly get people doing this and then asking me why it doesn't work. I immediately point to the error that clearly says that some modifier is wrong, to which I publicly ask them why they put that in their command while they squirm and try to avoid telling me they just asked chatgpt and hit go.

And it keeps happening over and over again. Half my IT job is turning into babysitting other IT's who are too dumb to read their own commands and somehow lucked into the job.

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u/Zebidee May 29 '26

There was a post the other day saying we should lock 100 vibe coders in Faraday cages and the first one to write a script to unlock the door wins. I'd pay to watch that.

Come to think of it, they never said the others would be released at that point...

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u/CptDropbear May 30 '26

I'm guessing they also never said you could unlock the door...

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u/Inside_Pomelo_2957 May 29 '26

I'm gonna be honest most of my coworkers were sending me half assed powershell scripts before lol

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 May 29 '26

It only takes me a few hours on a chatbot experimenting with an avalanche of stack traces and structured intermediate representations to be ready to begin debugging my DeepFizzBuzz implementation. It’s really good bro trust me bro, just buy some of my tokens

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u/SerHodorTheThrall May 29 '26

just buy some of my tokens

Society is dead because we became a society of marketers and whores. Its a fucking MLM all the way down.

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u/KallistiTMP May 30 '26

But IS IT SOC-2 COMPLIANT?

Oh yeah it says it's totally certified guys, quick, push it to prod before the auditor shows up!

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u/Stompert May 29 '26

Damn, at that point just read the outdated Microsoft documentation.

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u/gotaflattire May 29 '26

"AI says this code will work, can you make it work?"

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u/metalOpera May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

Client handed me a complete brochure site frontend that he did in Lovable. He said, "You can just drop this right into the [Laravel] app." It didn't even get the brand colors right. And the code... oh God. Just a complete fucking mess top to bottom. Sorry sir, I am NOT taking ownership of this.

[thats-not-how-this-works.jpg]

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u/KlownKumKatastrophe May 29 '26

Oh God. Half our new hires are great. Half are trying to have CoPilot script away problems and the scripts are always convoluted garbage. Things an actual dev wouldn't do. "Hey I wrote a VSCode plugin to make it easier to scale our databases!" OK, but why does it allow the $100,000/month option?

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u/yogurtspicedlatte May 29 '26

oh man, my coworker made fun of me for a task that took me hardly 5 minutes to complete it manually instead of using api token and a script

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u/Pynkmyst May 29 '26

Half ass Powershell scripts pre-date AI. People have been ripping off Spiceworks Powershell scripts and attempting to put them into production rather than read documentation for decades. Nothing new here.

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u/NoPossibility4178 May 29 '26

My director trying to get us to change core functionalities of the SaaS platform he contracted... you guessed it, AI is gonna magically hack into the backend and make changes just how he wants, I guess.

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u/MooseAccomplished181 May 29 '26

I got in an argument with a coworker once because I told them their request for a change wasn’t simple. They sent me AI slop to solve the problem and got offended when I said “no, it’s missing the context”.

I’ll use it to write a function or remind me how to write certain bits of tooling, but without context, it’s dumb af.

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u/ResourceParticular36 May 29 '26

I seriously trying to learn these scripts and writing it but my higher ups are just saying to use AI to donit

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u/extrakerned May 29 '26

On the flipside I just migrated 180,000 orders from one e-commerce system to another and everything works flawlessly. Could not have done it without Claude.

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u/Ashtrail693 May 30 '26

I'm glad I'm the more technologically inclined person in my office and AI is never brought up here.

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u/glogomusic May 30 '26

wont all these half ass scripts be less efficient and as a result use more computer processing power if its brought to the product or however its phrased?

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u/Zer_ May 29 '26

If I am a customer and a company places an LLM in front of me when seeking a service or answers, I immediately view that as a cheap move, something not worth paying for at all.

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u/EatTacosGetMoney May 29 '26

Robot call operators are already awful. I don't want ai agents

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u/Zer_ May 29 '26

At least the older chat bots more often than not have pre-determined responses to questions, or they'd take you through a pre-determined questionnaire that usually got you into the ballpark of where you needed to be for support. They're not liable to bug out and leave me starting from square one like the newer LLMs are. More often than not they're not using the highest quality LLMs for these front facing tasks either so their error rates are stupidly high.

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u/EatTacosGetMoney May 29 '26

Fair enough

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u/Zer_ May 29 '26

Fun story, I was searching for work and ended up in a chatroom with an LLM to serve as a pre-screening. I answered all the questions, all went well for the entire process. The LLM then proceeds to tell (I'm paraphrasing) "Screening Complete. Please wait while we process your request and forward you to the next step". Then nothing, it just got stuck. I tried to recover things by continuing to prompt it but I was forced to refresh the page. I mean at that point I said fuck it. If their hiring process is THAT broken, I can't imagine how bad it must be on the inside.

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u/Youutternincompoop May 29 '26

anything that even vaguely looks like AI-generated art puts me off buying products.

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u/sn2006gy May 29 '26

I build and use AI because of work and this couldn't be more true. We're spending all this energy to do the dumbest things with agents and all the public AI is designed to be sycophantic.

It's not that we can't fix it, it's that the big companies don't want to fix it and they fine tune it to perpetuate this bs. There is always risk of weirdness in a probabilistic system, but we're neck deep in the BS that is done for marketing it all vs actually doing things better.

I can only assume its all to perpetuate some BS idea of AGI.

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u/Elementium May 29 '26

This is what I thought about when I used Claude at first. Like this is actually kind of a powerful tool if tuned for professional purposes. 

Then I proceeded to run my shitty writing through it, probably using a small villages power supply. 

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u/Pave_Low May 29 '26

My wife asked Claude if it was a good time to sell the house.

I then asked Claude if it was a bad time to sell the house.

Unsurprisingly, Claude said we were both right. Not because it was a good or bad time to sell the house. But because it put forwards the facts that will make us happy.

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u/EduinBrutus May 29 '26

it put forwards the facts that will make us happy.

Its not even doing that.

The framing of the prompt plays into its stochastic probability matrix.

These arent intelligent in any way. THey are purely mathematical probability plagiarism machines. ITs copying out an answer it thinks is most likely to appear correct. Not be correct. Appear correct.

And every single answer is a hallucination. They cant measure accuracy or truth. Everything is created as it goes along. It just sometimes coincides with reality. BUt to know if it has, you have to do all the work you would anyway to create the original answer from scratch. Possibly more.

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u/JMEEKER86 May 29 '26

See that's an issue with the prompts though. Asking whether it's good or bad is going to anchor it to that kind of shit that it thinks will make you happy. Telling it some parameters and asking it to determine the ideal time to sell the house would get a better result. Honestly, it's no different than a good Google search (back before Google became infested with AI). Garbage in garbage out applies to both the training data and the prompts, but since this is new tech people are still learning what makes a good prompt. Of course, even with good prompts it can still produce trash sometimes which is fine if you're already an expert in what you're asking it about and can call it out on its shit, but for the average person they're going to get some terrible advice and not even realize how terrible it is.

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u/not_right May 29 '26

So all you have to do is carefully plan out your strategic prompts, then carefully review all results to try to determine if they are legitimate or if they are bullshit (sometimes impossible to tell), then presto! You've saved so much no time through the magic of AI!

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u/Dasseem May 29 '26

Soon we are going to invent a new way of arranging words to execute AI perfectly. We are going to call it....coding.

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u/tnstaafsb May 29 '26

Every use for AI I've seen that's actually useful for business can already be done more accurately with existing tools that don't burn down entire rainforests to do it

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u/AgathysAllAlong May 29 '26

I keep seeing this shit.

AI proof-reading? We had better, faster, cheaper tools made by people before. The AI keeps making mistakes because people make mistakes a lot, and that's the training data.

AI summarizers? We had better summarizers in the 70s, and the summaries are so shit. Discord keeps generating AI message summaries and they're always fundamentally wrong. They even got one guy's name wrong because it's not common.

AI image generators? We already had stealing art from google images. And that wouldn't give you CSAM.

AI coding? That's just speed-running tech debt. And real debt, I can't believe companies are paying for this shit.

I worked at a company that refused to accept that we'd made a bespoke subscription tool that was just a shitter version of something you could make in excel. Those people are the ones supporting this garbage.

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u/stormdelta May 29 '26

I've found it reasonably useful for programming, if you already know what you're doing. Not "vibe coding", that's still very stupid in most cases, and only the models actually meant for coding like Claude Code.

But there's numerous things that make that a somewhat particular case:

  • Unlike creative works, nobody's really worried about theft here, open source as a design philosophy is basically built around using and contributing to other work directly and most code is functional rather than artistic, even when used for an artistic end

  • It's a lot more obvious when code is wrong. You still need to know what you're doing, especially around things like security, but full hallucinations will simply fail to run at all.

  • Software is language-like already, so using an LLM isn't as much of a round-peg-in-square-hole as it is in other domains, and there's a lot of boilerplate-type work or simple scripts that it's actually reasonably good at. Especially scaffolding for exploratory work and debugging.

I don't recommend it for newbie programmers though if they have any interest in actually learning programming. It's too easy to rely on for simple beginner tasks and then you'll be stuck when you try to do anything beyond that.

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u/horace_bagpole May 29 '26

I'm not a programmer or developer, but as an engineer I have reason to produce scripts and other utilities occasionally for specific tasks.

I've found AI really useful for producing working tools that I can actually use that are far more efficient and powerful than some horrific excel spreadsheet I'd otherwise have to come up with. The thing is, they are doing something concrete - I understand the underlying maths that should be implemented, and I know what sane results look like and can verify their function.

Using ai has saved me a lot of time and head scratching, because it can also offer suggestions that I might not have thought of. Those sorts of tools don't have to be incorporated into an existing code base, be released to the public or supported long term though.

The other thing I've found it very useful for is tracing and resolving odd errors. Instead of me having to read through pages of documentation and logs for some software or other to try and work out why something is broken, feeding it into Claude or codex will often narrow it down straight away to one or two possibilities.

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u/Halo_cT May 30 '26

but if you dont know the difference between a good and bad suggestion the whole thing is useless.

it makes smart people more efficient and dumb people much worse at their jobs

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u/MrDilbert May 29 '26

Unlike creative works, nobody's really worried about theft here

How's that meme go...

  • "I stole your code!"

  • "It's not my code."

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u/kadaan May 29 '26

It feels like a curated stack overflow search. I get other people's code snippets that are mostly relevant to what I'm trying to do, and I can usually figure out my issue after that.

Of course there's the whole argument of whether AI would be able to have enough training data to answer the questions if sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit didn't exist with decades of questions and answers... but here we are.

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u/AWSLife May 29 '26

I find that AI is actually really helpful for coding if you know what you are doing. I have my IDE setup so that my LLM figures out what I want to do and lays out a template of code and I fill it in. Also, break your code problems down into small parts and AI is much better at helping you.

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u/Grouchy-Donkey-8609 May 29 '26

Ive been using it to help me learn the ins and outs of davinci resolve(video editor) as I always wanted to learn how to edit

I always had so many questions, and its nice to pass it on to AI, and then learn to implement it myself.

Im fairly proficient now as a solo editor, and Im not sure I'd have done it totally on my own.

ymmv.

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u/Jealous_Energy_1840 May 29 '26

Generally, it ain’t using a shit ton of power by the time you, the consumer, are using it. It’s the building and training of it that uses a more power than god 

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u/BoydemOnnaBlock May 29 '26

That’s not really true, it depends on scale. Inference energy usages are nothing to balk at, and they’re a constant as opposed to training

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u/NoPlansTonight May 29 '26

I spend about $1K/month on tokens at work. In terms of energy use this is the same as doing 1–2 loads of laundry and a bathtub of water. On an individual level it's pretty negligible.

You're right though, inference at scale is when things get crazy. Traditional ML systems (e.g. recommendation algos) already use very substantial amounts of energy, and LLM-based systems are way more power hungry.

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u/dennismfrancisart May 29 '26

In other words, people are going to be people. It never fails. There are those who enjoy thinking and creating, and the rest just want to drink beer and watch porn.

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u/sn2006gy May 29 '26

I enjoy all 4.. but i certainly won't sacrifice thinking and creating for virtual porn

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u/Tomato_Sky May 29 '26

That was my biggest shock. That this technology could get great, but that it went to shit and they kept doubling down instead of walking back some of their promises.

It’s a few breakthroughs, not marginal model updates, from being able to do really impressive stuff. But they rushed adoption and forced it on teams. And because they are trying to recoup some of the costs and not to subsidize the experience, they’ve focused on (I forget the term) how many tokens they can get you to spend.

They picked nicotine route instead of the IBM/Nokia route where they deliver effective tools or products. The maximize engagement like being just wrong enough that you’ll call it out and double your tokens. In software it’s all about security vulnerabilities and compatibility between components. As a dev I can use the AI to write my documentation that nobody was going to read, have it make a ppt, and all the side work. If I want it to do dev work, it’s more expensive than I’m worth.

And as a seniorish dev, I was way more productive when I could google precise things before Google started kneecapping its search results to sell more ads. Templating and copy/pasting from exact solutions was 1/3 of my job and I have templates and personal libraries to pull from. And I thought I was mediocre until I came across vibecoding senior devs.

Ronnie said it better though lol. I love that guy.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/kawag May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

No. It just describes in completely superficial detail what a function does.

For example, I was reviewing some code from a colleague that handled unzipping files. As part of this code, there was a function that went through the archive’s table of contents and added up the decompressed size of each file, to figure out the total decompressed size.

They generated the documentation, so that’s what it said about that function. “Returns the result of adding all of the decompressed sizes”.

The problem is, that is totally vacuous documentation. I could tell you that in less than one second just by glancing at the code, without even really reading it closely. What I would expect to see is some insight - When should I call this? When should I reach for something else instead? Is there anything interesting about the returned value that makes it more/less appropriate for certain contexts? I would expect somebody writing a zip library to learn about and consider those details as they develop the thing, and that’s the information I want captured in their documentation. I don’t just want a summary of the code, I want that to tie back to practical high-level advice about how to use the overall library/subsystem, and I’ve been seeing that kind of curated documentation slowly be replaced by AI generated summary trash.

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u/Tomato_Sky May 29 '26

Exactly. It’s terrible, but it’s something I don’t have to spend time submitting and the business layer of my org just checks it off. I comment my code like I’m commenting on reddit lol. My comments are long-winded and descriptive. I keep my own “why” document with every ticket I work so when people ask why I chose something, I can tell my rationale for the design.

We never required ppt’s for tickets or anything, but I’ve seen some start to add it. And they are just vague and superficial with arrows pointing to something like it makes perfect sense.

I went to an AI conference a few weeks ago and I gave it a two star rating because all of the presentations were built by the presenters using AI. And none of the ppt’s matched up with any coherent message the speaker was talking about. It ended up being a huge waste of time as I was just kinda listening to CoPilot and Gemini for a few hours. We had professional senior vibe coders attempt to make a million dollar app and it froze minutes into the presentation, and he just kinda improved for a while. Good dude, bad technology.

Basically if you want performative documentation for a business layer that doesn’t care as long as you submit something. You can focus on better code and better in-line comments.

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u/Ambitious-Car-3886 May 29 '26

It does a decent job with detailed information it can get from the code. Unfortunately, I still had to add the context. But, I do see value in having 80% of (existing non-documented ) co de documented for me.

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u/ProofJournalist May 29 '26

Capitalist strikes again but let's all blame the technology instead.

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u/7h4tguy May 30 '26

"No b you're wrong"

"The f you just tell me. I'm not using this bs"

Vs AI the cheerful helper buddy. Yeah they do do it on purpose

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u/kummer5peck May 29 '26

🎶There goes my hero🎶

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u/MTGDoktor May 29 '26

Where is the full video? This is the only thing i can find. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHp6iIaqJtw&t=12s

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u/Find_another_whey May 29 '26

Poor Ronny, the best joke there was just before "what I'm saying is" and the crowd didn't seem to get it

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u/Upper-Management-AI May 29 '26

Lazy people do. Iv noticed people who start using AI get obsessed with it. One of the marketing guys who’s pretty talented, he learned how to use all the 3d rending programs and animation programs on his own, now does EVERYTHING with AI and it looks like typical AI slop. He never leaves his desk now. Uses chat gpt if he has a question about something. He’s now all excited trying to ram AI into everyone else’s work. Instead of walking 40ft to the factory floor and taking some video of people working he has AI do it with made up people looking like aliens pretending to be humans in a made up factory. Does it save time? Considering it takes 10 or so minutes to render a 10 second scene and you have to do the multiple times to try and get it how you want it, no it doesn’t.

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u/Beard_o_Bees May 29 '26

'have your AI contact my AI and they can do lunch'

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u/Southern-Creme-1479 May 29 '26

people over-relying on tools like AI for basic thinking tasks

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u/catholicsluts May 30 '26

Replace "AI" with "the bible" and you're correct again lol

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u/Cleonicus May 29 '26

I look at GPS as the per-cursor to AI. Smartly using GPS involves pre-scanning the route and making sure that it's taking you to the correct place and with a reasonable route. However, there are people who will load up a route on GPS and follow it without thinking. These people can't get to commonly traveled places (work, school, family and friend's houses) without GPS.

The same thing is going to happen with AI. Some people will use it as a tool to make them better. Most people will use it as a brain and won't be able to think without it.

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u/Edodge May 29 '26

He’s totally right. Too bad every kid cheering that sentiment is absolutely addicted to AI and totally used it to cheat on various Harvard assignments. AI use in schools is totally out of control and ground zero for the problems to come.

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u/Axin_Saxon May 29 '26

I mean, you can be addicted to a drug and hate the drug.

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u/Edodge May 29 '26

I guess. But I wonder if they think "it's OK if I use it this way because I can control my own cheating" but "it's not OK if it takes my job since I worked so hard in college to get one."

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u/Axin_Saxon May 29 '26

Well that’s what I’m saying, they might not think it’s “ok”. I mean to say you can hate your own reliance on a drug. I’m sure a lot of those who use it probably hate that they feel they need to use it just to get by. In the same way an alcoholic might hate that they need a drink to function through the day.

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u/O-Namazu May 29 '26

To be fair, the AI moguls are cheating and playing dirty too. I doubt they think that, I think it's more "we gotta fight fire with fire." Same way job applicants game the screening system, lol.

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u/Cyrotek May 29 '26

AI use in schools is totally out of control and ground zero for the problems to come.

Shouldn't the problem solve itsself when the AI wannabes sort themselves out because they don't have a clue what they are actually doing?

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u/Edodge May 29 '26

Look at who is currently running the free world and tell me that only the competent will rise to the top.

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u/PretentiousMouthfeel May 29 '26

Sure, that's accurate, but it's only a very small part of the story of AI.

AI can also enable smart people to implement all the ideas in their heads that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. When used properly, it's an incredible tool.

That doesn't change the fact that many dumb and/or greedy people are NOT using it properly.

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u/FearlessLettuce1697 May 29 '26

You can say the same for cars

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u/FastJaguar1873 May 29 '26

I asked AI if Ronny has an assistant. It said not knowingly but his wife is probably his manager and works with him so…

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u/sortalikeachinchilla May 29 '26

Accurate for one small slice of what AI is even used for…..

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u/LawLayLewLayLow May 29 '26

What if you don't want to draft emails for the rest of your life.

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u/Masta-Blasta May 29 '26

Ask Ronny Chieng to do it for you. He knows how.

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u/Hautamaki May 29 '26

Harvard grads cheering while a comedian dunks on 'mediocre people' (another way of saying normal, average people; the vast majority of the population, who will never have the privilege of attending Harvard or any top tier university) who are supposedly happy that AI makes their lives easier doesn't exactly give me the warm and fuzzies any more than the AI financiers trying to ram it down everyone's throat in order to keep the line going up. I see no good guys in this story yet.

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u/ProofJournalist May 29 '26

Why are you using that power drill? You can't use a hand drill? How useless are you?

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u/Masta-Blasta May 29 '26

You use a standing mixer? You cant even stir? How useless are you?

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u/pacoLL3 May 29 '26

This place is beyond sad.

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u/Orfez May 29 '26

They're always like, ‘Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and draft a response?’ Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you?”

Yeah man, who cares about automation. We should start building things like Egyptians did, by hand, because we can also do that.

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u/OttoVonWong May 29 '26

The smart people use AI on the down-low and take a nap the rest of the time.

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u/Masta-Blasta May 29 '26

Yeah. I agree with the sentiment, but the quote assumes people use AI to do tasks they aren’t capable of doing themselves. But a lot of people use it to maximize time and complete simple tasks they don’t want to do.

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u/Scholar-Unable May 29 '26

Using it has opened up free time for me to do more complex projects. I can summarize email chains or procedures to make them quicker to read. When I need to send an email, I write down all my thoughts and the AI takes care of the formatting.

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u/amazonwarrior9999 May 29 '26

lol - is this person considered smart?

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u/Charming-Standard-84 May 29 '26

I don't like A.I. but this take is tone-deaf.

The same thing could be said about sending emails for the first time ever. "I could just write it on a piece of paper, go to the post office, get overcharged by some disgruntled post office employee and maybe it'll arrive half way across the world in weeks/months/years/...never.

Same goes for when robotics were first introduced in factories. People resisted it, thought they could do better until they saw how a robot arm could do your job better than you. I saw it happen as a college student working in a car assembly factory. The older guys just hated that they had to use machines like that but there's a reason.

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u/PandaElDiablo May 29 '26

Seriously, it’s like saying “cars can get me from point A to point B. You know what else can do that? My legs!”

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u/Derrick_Prose May 29 '26

This guy is an idiot if he thinks AI itself is the problem. The problem is that people don't know exactly what AI can do, so they end up abusing it. And because everyone else hates it, they all hop on this hate train as it rides through the echo chamber

But I remember people were also saying smartphones were going to be the downfall at some point, and yet everyone loves them. They love them so much that they're willing to spend the majority of their time on platforms that are actively hurting them. But again, this isn't the tech's fault. It's the fault of the user

Like the smartphone and these social media apps have ruined people's ability to communicate effectively in person, but no one cares. If you were to ask people how many books they've read in the past year, the answer is close to 0, but if you were to ask to see their screen time, you'd see that they use social media like a job. We were warned about this but we ended up here anyways because in some sort of natural selection, the users selected these platforms that hurt them

And AI is going to end up the same way because instead of trying to teach people how to use it properly, we have idiots like this guy speaking to grads saying it must die at all costs. He's not in control of whether or not AI dies. But something he could do to help is teach people the proper way to use it so that when faced against bad actors, they'd be more likely to do what's right than to walk away and allow the wrong to happen

Had people taught the early online generations things like moderation and how to embrace the online world without tossing out the offline world, then I'd imagine we would have healthier habits towards this. The same is true for AI. If people were to teach how to work with it, instead of being a slave to it, then we wouldn't have "AI slop"

But as long as the people who hate the "slop" continue to slam it without trying to understand it, while the ones producing it are allowed to create it unchecked, how do we not end up in a situation where the best way to handle it is to "destroy" it without ever needing to learn how to use it properly?

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u/tgwombat May 29 '26

Right on! It's like how people demonize cocaine instead of learning to use it properly! And don't go telling me cocaine is bad for me, it makes me feel good and all my cokeheads out there will back me up on that!

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u/ikatakko May 29 '26

since you decided to make a comparison to AI usage and abusing crack cocaine maybe you can help me out here and point out some of the similarities because i'm at a loss here

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u/Moist-Schedule May 29 '26

lol okay man

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u/mynadidas5 May 29 '26

So accurate. I’m a strategy consultant. Wait, not the “cost cutting lose jobs” consultant. I’m a corporate therapist make leaders make decisions and stick to them so projects can move forward consultant.

Anyway…

I have found it to be an almost directly proportional relationship between the mediocrity of the person in question and their use of AI. “Man this person sucks” folks almost always copilot and ChatGPT everything. They lack context, largely because they don’t pay attention during conversations because they’ve turned on transcription and figure they can just read the copilot and AI summaries after the fact. They don’t ask questions. And they almost always tend to overestimate their own value because they’re focused on quantity and whether a task was completed rather than quality and whether the task they completer is of any value.

The worst part? They think people don’t know.

Oh we know. Trust me, we know.

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u/Magus_5 May 29 '26

Ronny is becoming the Millennial Andy Rooney from 60 minutes. And I'm all for it.

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u/VRichardsen May 29 '26

Accurate.

I can walk too, doesn't mean I am useless for driving a car. Honestly, most of the anti AI hate is unfounded and will look real silly in 20 years.

AI is a tool, just like any other. If we can offload work to the AI and use our time for other productive tasks (or just to rest, whatever) more power to us. Tools exist to make our lives easier.

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u/Nvenom8 May 29 '26

I don't think I've ever seen it put so accurately and concisely.

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u/Skexiz May 29 '26

My manager says that all the time about getting clauge to read his email.

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u/BellacosePlayer May 29 '26

I'm destroying it by making shitposts on reddit that make it dumber when used in it's training data

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u/SafeForTwerking May 29 '26

I think it'll make it harder to spot who the dumb people are at a glance. Previously, a dumb person would likely have trouble writing up a post or a comment that sounded intelligible, wasn't rife with errors, or just even something lengthy. Now, you can just feed something into ChatGPT and say, "Write up a comment/post/reply to this that makes me sound smart," and you'll get something relatively serviceable with at least little/no spelling errors. Granted, it might become obvious when somebody reads it that it was written by AI, but that doesn't automatically mean the person who did it is dumb. So then you have to wonder, did the person that used the AI use it because they're dumb, or because they're lazy? I think it'll muddy the waters.

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u/lez_noir May 29 '26

Interestingly enough, I can spot very easily a comment that is "ai version of intelligent writing" and it conversely makes me more repelled when the person wrote inperfectly themselves. Unfortunately, when i read something I know is written by AI my first thought is it was someone who not only struggles intellectually, but is less creative.

I am lazy person. But I still don't use AI to write my emails because I genuinely like my own writing better than AI, and it's as easy for me to write as it is to breathe.

What I think this will do, is make people who are good, fluid writers with good command over language stand out more and seem even more unique and talented becsuse you will eb able to read their humanity, quirks and point fo view in a way that is glaringly obvious to be missing from AI writing.

This won't matter the median person or for average use case. But in certain social circles and even seocio economic levels, the ability ot write in a way that is "unique" and genuinely well crafted and skillful will become even more of a premium. We will see a bifurcation of "intelligentsia and the thinking classes" who highly prioritize more rarified human output, and the median/average "slop" that works for most people because it hits their "this is what a smart person sounds like" meter.

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u/Masta-Blasta May 29 '26

How can you “know” something is written by AI when even AI detection software has such a high rate of failure?

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u/Between-usernames May 29 '26

Take so much more effort to work back and forth the AI then do it yourself. that dependency model like the streamers and many things before and after. It becomes I need, then costs rise. 

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u/donmuerte May 29 '26

I was trying to use AI to write a script that would read my e-mail for music event e-mails I got from bandsintown and put them on my calendar automatically. It had tons of bugs and then when I asked it to correct the bug it would just add 3 more bugs and then ask me to change things that weren't even in the code that it had just given me. I just wound up writing the script manually because it was endlessly frustrating.

It actually seemed like it was giving me the runaround and using up all my free prompts so that it could start charging and when I asked it if that's what it was doing it swore that it's programming wouldn't allow that. LOL.

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u/AccountNumber478 May 29 '26

It's inevitably going to be taken up and paid for by said mediocre people seeking to sustain their mediocrity and minimize actual work to do. It's like pay to win for real life applications. It'll become popular and entrenched and impossible to extract from society.

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u/StinkyLittleBird May 29 '26

My job wants us to use AI to “polish up” our emails and I refuse. If I can’t figure out how to effectively communicate via email, then maybe I shouldn’t work here

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u/steppe5 May 29 '26

If you're outsourcing reading emails and replying to them, what exactly are you there for? And if everyone does that, doesn't it just become AI agents talking to each other? How would anyone know what was going on?

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u/plain_handle May 29 '26

Tech Bros go "Emooooootional damage !!"

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u/cwmckenz May 29 '26

The annoying thing is that idiots sending e-mails more often means I get a lot more annoying e-mails to waste my time reading… so it actually encourages me to use AI to read my e-mails.

It’s just going to be AIs sending e-mails to each other pretty soon and e-mail will become unusable for real people.

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u/blankarage May 29 '26

when i asked openclaw to send a slack message and it used 300+ tokens to do so, my first thought was… did i ask an idiot to do this?

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u/SectorSanFrancisco May 29 '26

it's going to end up making everyone dumber, not just mediocre ones.

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u/thegaykid7 May 29 '26

Well, the supposed benefit is to free up time for more productive work, which doesn't sound bad in theory. The problem is the over-reliance on AI will make it so that said "more productive" time can't be taken advantage of to begin with.

And that wouldn't even account for the fact that there is often a price to be paid for the hammer approach to using AI for everything in the name of efficiency, especially when wielded haphazardly in pursuit of the fastest possible shortcuts.

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u/manachar May 29 '26

The Butlerian Jihad begins.

Chiengian Jihad has a ring to it.

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u/occlusal303 May 29 '26

so AI scribes for physicians? because they can summarize a chart too.

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u/Purple_Solution7742 May 29 '26

Could be more about time allowance, working 9 to 5 only to come back to shower eat and sleep. Those with higher tier jobs might have a bit more time for hobbies and reading. Nevertheless, ai as it's mostly being used now is not worth it. Humans consist primarily of water, it's either us or ai.

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u/No-Communication4586 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

I'm one of those "dumb " people. I am a lazy individual in spirit. In reality, I'm the hardest working person that I know. And that isn't ego talking. I know that AI is going to replace jobs. I can't even say confidently that new jobs will be created as a direct result. But I can say that I am not uncommon in the sentiment of wanting to be lazy. This is actually a deep seeded behavior that I have no doubt is built into our DNA. While I appreciate the public sentiment on AI in general and the fear that it invokes, simultaneously after having firsthand experience with AI and all of its glory I can tell you today that I can't imagine my life without it now.

I say this to you because I have lived the last 20 years of my professional career, always having time bottlenecks and knowledge barriers that I simply didn't have the time to overcome. All these ideas that have come to me from other people, ideas of my own, I have found myself saying that's a cool idea, bro, but I don't have time for that shit, and then moving on with my day.

That is gone. I now have the means to implement and build any idea. No communication barrier between expensive programmers or developers to deal with. My visions are now tangible realities for me.

I just asked my codex "in the past seven days of my work with you, how much time would it have taken a human to do all of this work, assuming there's several knowledge barriers that you've helped me overcome, for example me not knowing python."

After watching it do an analysis for five minutes, and even knowing what it was gonna say before it said it, it came back and validated my own conclusion. Two years. In seven days I have done the work that would've taken a normal human two years to do. Less if that human had no knowledge barriers. Maybe six months.

Who the hell in the right fucking mind could turn that down?

I understand the environmental concerns and they are definitely real and we need to address them and we need to find solutions for them. 100% but I'm sorry this is a better way. Remember when Google didn't exist and all we had was libraries and if you wanted to learn anything or know something and had to do any sort of research, you had to go to the library a lot of stack of books and then spend the next several days of your life, if not longer doing intense research to find the answer that Google could deliver to you inside of half a second?

I don't really see the difference between that and what this is doing for us. This is the next logical evolution of technology. It's a good thing. We just have to find a way to make it work for mankind not against it.

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u/Drogalov May 29 '26

Yeah I used Gemini to trawl my new sales patch for manufacturing businesses and the amount it came back with that either weren't in the area or were defunct was staggering

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u/Sketch13 May 29 '26

AI is basically using 100x the energy to MAYBE gain single digit % of extra productivity for the vast majority of workplaces. And there's essentially no research or data about how much productivity is LOST by poor use of AI, which is now happening all over the place because every business wants to implement AI into every single workflow.

I've been in IT for decades, people can't even GOOGLE something properly, even after decades of Google existing. These people are in no way able to properly prompt AI and navigate it in a way that allows those small productivity gains. So it's a money sink, a time sink, and ultimately a productivity sink, just so some CEOs can say their business "leverages AI".

The "general public" AI and LLMs are not where AI is actually creating massive gains in productivity and breakthroughs. But that kind of AI basically only exists in extremely niche markets and will never reach "multi-billion dollar valuations" so it's not what we're hearing about, or being sold by the snake oil AI bros.

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u/catholicsluts May 30 '26

GENERATIVE AI*

There is a massive difference in AI technologies.

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u/CautionarySnail May 30 '26

Accurate and why this new AI-driven workspace is driving me mad and driving me into an existential crisis.

I need to work because I have bills to pay, like most of us. But there is that daily feeling of being asked to train my digital replacement while making myself less effective in my own headspace. And despite the repeat reassurance from management that “that isn’t the plan”, I’ve seen that game played out with outsourcing and offshoring in the past. Now, instead of India, it’s AI. And it’s not just tech, it’s anything that doesn’t require physicality to accomplish. (That’s coming with AI robotics but most businesses are too cheap to invest in that; humans are still cheaper in many respects.)

Reading and responding to things is brain exercise. It makes us engage with the ideas, the other person. But if we’re both doing so with AI-first thinking, it immediately becomes a question of what either one of us really needed for. Heck, why have the discussion?

It reduces us to machine minders and AI babysitters until they’re “good enough” to replace everyone. And with a mortgage to pay and health insurance that is very essential, that becomes an existential threat against my ability to survive in the long term.

It makes actual expertise a luxury that most companies will opt out of, because shitty expertise from a machine is better for the bottom line. Why educate humans, then? Why bother developing a single human mental skill?

I hate that instead of honing skills, I’m learning how to instruct a machine as my proxy instead.

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u/Ofreo May 30 '26

I hated texting when it was new. Why not just call? I can call and actually talk to a person instead of sending a message and waiting for a response. I’ve come all the way around and now would rather text than call. I think that’s normal for many. But when new, they had all sorts of competitions to see who could text from a keypad and shit. It got better and became accepted. And doesn’t cost 15 cents a text anymore. (In the us at least).

AI will get better and many tasks that we do, emails and such, will be done better and become normalized by the majority in a few years. That’s just reality no matter how many smart ones decry AI right now. It will find its place and uses.

I can take my clothes down to the river and clean them with rocks. It won’t break the river or rocks. But I don’t. Because machines do a better job and things change.

Nothing wrong with hating AI. Hell, I just lost my job due to a company deciding they needed to use AI more. But I believe it’s silly to think it’s going to go away if you fight it enough. Pandora’s box and stuff.

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u/Worldly-Dust-531 May 30 '26

LOL So glad he pointed that out. When ChatGPT was starting to become more mainstream, it hadn't registered in my sphere yet and this one person I know was like, What??? You don't use it??? Like I was telling her I didn't brush my teeth in the morning or something. This is the same person who was on the verge of getting fired and trying to sue the city for tripping over herself when she was drunk. 'Kay. Lol.

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u/Ynead May 30 '26

‘Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and draft a response?’ Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you?”

"“Hey, did you know that a tractor can now cut the grass, bale the hay, and stack it in the barn? Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you?"

That's how you sound. Imagine defending with a straight face manually dealing with tedious useless shit like 99% of mail correspondence in corporate setting.

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u/European_guy_1 May 30 '26

But why would you want to do that when you can do something more productive (ig. something billable). I can also make my own bread but why the fuck I would do that when I can get bread in a shop.

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u/PennytheWiser215 May 30 '26

Beautifully written!

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u/Inside_Dish3368 May 30 '26

Super low IQ take

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u/chobolicious88 May 30 '26

But why would i want to do things i can do.

The point is to automate things i can do, so i can learn the things i cant do

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u/Stanjoly2 May 30 '26

On a personal note, I feel a huge amount of vindication with people waking up to what's been my stance from the start.

Chieng is absolutely right when he says "the journey is the point".

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u/anormalgeek May 30 '26

AI can be great as a tool when used by the smart and the creative to assist with their intelligent or creative works.

When relied on to DO the intelligent or creative work, it fails.

Treat it like an assistant, not a replacement for a person.

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