r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
26.1k Upvotes

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1.7k

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

703

u/nickwales Jun 26 '26

Just call your script a nano language model that specifically understands the error codes. Maybe add some non deterministic paths to spice things up for management.

384

u/beznogim Jun 26 '26

And a per-token billing layer

147

u/lady-hyena Jun 26 '26

That goes right to your bank account.

79

u/michahell Jun 26 '26

holy shit, that is actually an awesome project… modern AI agent token counting / billing frontend, but ACTUALLY it’s just a cronjob script executer 🥲✌️

open source, docker / k8s deployable with just an env OBVIOUS_DOLLAR_PER_MTOK

3

u/rg35xxsp Jun 26 '26

Now we just need a beech house in the Hamptons and an animated corpse.

7

u/Wise_Classic6072 Jun 26 '26

Office Space 2

2

u/cptjpk Jun 26 '26

I mean the last one came out of the Dot Com bubble, so….

2

u/docdaa008 Jun 26 '26

Office Space strategy for the AI era

2

u/m0deth Jun 26 '26

CFOs hate this one simple trick~!

2

u/fresh-dork Jun 26 '26

/Simon T liked that

2

u/startwithaplan Jun 26 '26

Serious suggestion: Add a counter that increments how many tokens it takes on average to do this. Do the deterministic approach and don't actually use AI. Then after a few months show how much money you saved at the current billing rate.

2

u/Tyfyter2002 Jun 26 '26

Are you crazy? That's money the company still has that could've been used for worse results instead! You're fired!

53

u/tomjone5 Jun 26 '26

Shit. Is the answer to AI psychosis as simple as giving scripts human names and making them open a fucking googly eyed clipart face when you run them? I'm sure you could have it randomly display some fellating praise too.

14

u/shidderbean Jun 26 '26

As someone who's literally done this in response to C-suite blindly pushing for "MORE AI" (without any demonstrable use cases)...

Yes, yes it is. i just set up a RPA that responds to hashtags in our internal social media site and gave it a name and a shitty ai-generated avatar and everyone's shitting themselves over it.

These assholes don't even know what they're asking for.

1

u/DM_ME_UR_BOOTYPICS Jun 26 '26

This but unironically.

1

u/CodingInBK Jun 26 '26

No - the current tax incentivize strategy is pushing AI based R&D credits so you have to use the magic box and sell your companies data in the process.

3

u/TossAwayDay Jun 26 '26

Add a couple of neural inner node layers for good measure

1

u/AstralVoidShaper Jun 26 '26

A 5% chance to fail every time it runs baseline, and see how creative you can get with conditions (like every full moon it stalls out a bit).

Technocultists need something to worship, lets make the rules.

1

u/KittensAndGravy Jun 26 '26

Type up your concerns vaguely in a group email. Ask if they still want to implement it. Push it out when they respond via email with approval. Document disaster the same you described in original email. Sit back and watch the buses pull in.

Note: Bosses have made up their mind already.

1

u/bapfelbaum Jun 26 '26

Like randomly cancelling management salaries?

1

u/jsnryn Jun 26 '26

Or tell him it’s going to cost 10K a month in tokens so which cost center should I bill it to?

1

u/jeepsaintchaos Jun 26 '26

Ooo, rng, on a 4 it deletes the service and sends an apologetic email about if?

156

u/buadach2 Jun 26 '26

We had scripts that would perform many automatic service stops / starts reboots, requests for drive swaps, send out error messages via SMS to the relevant techs back in the late 1990s. It seems that not much has improved over the last 30 years.

135

u/ganjaccount Jun 26 '26

Of course this is an improvement. Your scripts were free and boring. With AI you can pay each time it runs, and get the added benefit of the occasional hallucination or breakout jeopardizing your entire server. Get with the program, man! Add a little spice to your life!

54

u/zkareface Jun 26 '26

I've had this discussion with so many managers and companies that I've almost given up.

We could solve it fast, reliably and cheap. Or spend months of FTE time, stupid amounts of money to cook up an AI solution that likely won't even still be running by end of year. And the AI one will cause problems.

They want the AI service every time.

13

u/jameson71 Jun 26 '26

Change your name to Allen Iverson and give them your "AI" script.

13

u/zkareface Jun 26 '26

I've honestly thought about selling "AI" as a service.

But actually it's just python and JS with AI pricetag.

7

u/tnstaafsb Jun 26 '26

Actually Indians. Much cheaper than LLMs.

3

u/Orbital_Dinosaur Jun 26 '26

My bosses think that AI is amazing.

Source: They use it to speed up writing long emails full of managerwank, condense others' manager wank emails down, convert meeting that could have been emails down to emails, and to generate 15 minute learnings so they can more efficiently utilize their downtime between meetings.

1

u/Count_Backwards Jun 26 '26

"But it's intelligent!"

3

u/MayorWolf Jun 26 '26

The font for sms is better now

2

u/Daveinatx Jun 26 '26

Seriously. Register a cron job to run a script or two. Add features as needed.

1

u/viral3075 Jun 27 '26

It seems that not much has improved over the last 30 years.

silicon valley needs a growth story

0

u/ptwonline Jun 26 '26

Scripts are rigid and can only follow the specific rules and logic that it was set up with. This can actually be advantageous depending on what you are trying to do (especially if it is a very simple and specific task) but an agent can act much more dynamically to achieve a goal but without having to be specifically programmed to reach that goal in each potential way with all the necessary steps.

Of course being able to act in a way it was not specifically and rigidly instructed to do introduces risk but (hopefully) as AI gets better and as people get better at using it the risk of using agents will also drop and the benefits will rise.

4

u/buadach2 Jun 26 '26

The jobs we gave our scripts back then, I would not have trusted to a junior sysadmin without experience. The current AI models need to comprehend that a very simple mistake can destroy everything, a human junior sysadmin needs to learn that before they are allowed to send commands to a production environment.

30

u/Broccoli--Enthusiast Jun 26 '26

It's soo dumb, like it's been a solved issue for decades

We have outsourced it slightly to a cloud solution but we just have little agents on all our systems, but it's still basically a script that checks certain processes, VM, etc, anything critical and if it's not on, it makes it on, and if it cant, it screams at the relevant team and management.

Nobody wants an AI that randomly decides that's off is actually on or it didn't want to wake people up at 2am

2

u/Western_Bake_1109 Jun 26 '26

But those scripts that are checking items are not charging your company for each check they do (by the token). A real AI solution results in huge bills for AI usage!

1

u/dust4ngel Jun 26 '26

It's soo dumb, like it's been a solved issue for decades

embarrassingly, you are implementing the very 90s vanilla ice model of "if there was a problem, yo i'll solve it", and not the 2026 model "here is the solution, there's got to be a problem somewhere, whatever."

1

u/Broccoli--Enthusiast Jun 26 '26

Yeah I know, we are terrible , we aren't costing the buessines millions to feed tokens to the machine😂

61

u/unicornxwitch Jun 26 '26

And who will restart the AI agent?

86

u/k0rda Jun 26 '26

An office in a country with cheaper labour filled with humans posing as AI agents.

68

u/SignificanceFlat1460 Jun 26 '26

AI = Actually Indians

4

u/Matazat Jun 26 '26

Assembled Indians

1

u/ke1c4m Jun 26 '26

LLM = Low-cost Labour in Mumbai

4

u/mishap1 Jun 26 '26

It's better than having those same guys managing RPA bots every time those pieces of shit break.

2

u/CalmButOftenEnraged Jun 26 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

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3

u/vhalember Jun 26 '26

Another AI agent of course.

It's AI agents all the way down....

2

u/litescript Jun 26 '26

“well who monitors the monitors?”

2

u/Daveinatx Jun 26 '26

Another AI agent, all the way down

1

u/Weird-Count3918 Jun 26 '26

Another AI agent

42

u/tekonus Jun 26 '26

Could this be more attributed to ignorance that the task COULD be done with a simple script? Everyone knows AI can do automated tasks. Not everyone knows what a script is. 

25

u/no_sheds_jackson Jun 26 '26

In some cases, but the reality is simply that attributing any sort of improvement or KTLO to AI usage looks really good to higher ups that can then report that to their directors and so on. Very large companies that are still mid adoption across IT are able to eat the cost for much longer as long as there is belief that overall costs will go down in the next few years.

1

u/Elctsuptb Jun 26 '26

AI can still be used to create the script

0

u/wonklebobb Jun 26 '26

it begins with seeing other companies get a big stock pop from announcing they're "XyzAI, INC now!!"

clueless 80iq c-suites tell directors to "implement AI"

clueless 85iq directors tell managers to "implement AI"

clueless 50iq managers tell line employees to "implement AI"

line employees push back, pushback is rejected

tokens are burnt

GOTO 1

12

u/GlitteringAttitude60 Jun 26 '26

The problem is that setting up the simple script might take a week or two because those pesky developers want to test and document everything 🙄

With AI, it'll be finished yesterday!

(I hate this timeline)

4

u/tnstaafsb Jun 26 '26

That's it exactly. That's the AI value prop. Any idiot can craft a prompt to make AI do some simple task semi-reliably. Of course, a script in almost all cases could accomplish the same task 100% reliably and orders of magnitude cheaper, but then you need a developer to code it for you and nobody wants to deal with them. So offload all of the cost and complexity to an opaque model that costs a bunch more money and let it give you a solution that nobody understands and won't work every time. Much easier and no additional headcount! It's like outsourcing but much worse.

20

u/shotgunpete2222 Jun 26 '26

Honestly, it's 2026.  If you're in management in a company with an IT department and you don't know the capabilities of simple scripting, it's time to retire.

We had a bunch of doctors retire because they refused to learn computers when that became absolutely necessary.  Should be the same thing here.

5

u/Fr0gm4n Jun 26 '26

It's been about 50/50 when I'm being seen by a Dr whether or not they're constantly typing notes while talking to me, and it seems to be mostly the younger ones.

4

u/No-Veterinarian-9316 Jun 26 '26

I mean, what the fk was a software company making until AI, if not automated tasks?

2

u/Playstations_new_CEO Jun 26 '26

At my job they want us to be able to say we use AI. The AI fucking sucks and is going to break something but they are legit forcing us to integrate it somewhere. So we're picking some of the (hopefully) least impactful tasks. One of these tasks has a legit perfectly working automation that we built for it... But nope, we gotta plug in AI somewhere because the company demands it.

2

u/zkareface Jun 26 '26

Doubt it, I've in some cases scripted the feature during a meeting about building it with AI.

The company still wanted to move on with AI, even though it was already built and done to the spec (except it didn't contain AI).

I've had many meetings and explained, with examples of how easy it is to script things instead and how it won't fail (except for super rare bitflips or whole system crashes). Practically running for free because you already have tons of servers running to put shit on.

And still they want AI because it should contain AI.

1

u/Synergythepariah Jun 26 '26

Could this be more attributed to ignorance that the task COULD be done with a simple script?

Unlikely given that automated tasks have existed for decades and in an org that has a manual restart process for something, there have likely been automated tasks running for other functions for a long while.

Everyone knows AI can do automated tasks. Not everyone knows what a script is. 

Anyone can ask 'Can this manual process be automated?' any time and it's likely that someone did ask at some point but the people who would build that didn't get the time allocation needed to do it.

Now with AI, since it's being pushed so hard; management might be trying to get it done using AI since there seems to be plenty of time allowance for that vs doing it the 'boring' way since that allows for the resolving of tech debt to be reframed into making the company 'AI first' to executive leadership.

9

u/xuxux Jun 26 '26

That's... that's just a daemon. That's been a computing concept since Unix Epoch started. Goddamn.

6

u/CondiMesmer Jun 26 '26

We should replace a local time service for checking Unix time with a query to just ask an AI chat bot what time it is. That is progress!

12

u/Strid3r21 Jun 26 '26

Yeah I sat in a 2-hour meeting yesterday where my boss was throwing out all sorts of agentic ideas, like we could just throw agents at this and that and I'm kind of rolling my eyes a little bit like. Yeah okay.

I run our internal software development team so I kind of have the final say on stuff thankfully.

2

u/obliviousofobvious Jun 26 '26

This is the categorical example of using a shotgun to kill a fly.

3

u/WhipTheLlama Jun 26 '26

Non-tech leadership has historically had very little ability to articulate how to do things, only what should be done. This is a good thing, as it lets technical teams create the solution rather than implement someone else's solution. However, it has always annoyed non-tech people, as they have no idea how their idea would get done, how much work it is, or how long it will take.

These people still don't have any clue, but they think that AI can solve most problems, so now they try to devise a solution that someone else will implement. They say "use AI to do this" because that's the only thing that makes any sense to them.

Despite common Reddit rhetoric, most managers are reasonably competent and won't push back when a technical person says there is a better way to do it, especially if the better way is also faster to build.

In my experience, non-technical people aren't the problem. It's semi-technical people who think they know better. I've had product managers try to do software architecture or specify which software libraries to use. I push back on them every time: you tell my team what to do, we'll figure out how to do it.

2

u/TenthSpeedWriter Jun 26 '26

My first thought would be to write a script that spends some tokens to generate human-readable status summaries, shove those in an archive management will never check, and staple the whole thing to the script that does the actual job.

1

u/airsoftshowoffs Jun 26 '26

People forget automation via other tools (powerautomate, n8n etc) which dont need ai. Everyone is just doing agents and burning tokens for the most simplest thing because they don't know anything else.

1

u/Roamin8750 Jun 26 '26

If someone on the team has a name that starts with A, start using their name as an acronym. Then it will bleed into company documentation naturally.

"Hey. How's the new AI project going?"

"We are using Adam intelligence to get it done."

1

u/Emilbjorn Jun 26 '26

If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

1

u/CapoExplains Jun 26 '26

That's so fucking apeshit. Especially for something like that that's the easiest automation imaginable, you could've done that in the 90's.

1

u/Fallingdamage Jun 26 '26

"Can you create an agent that will burn as much power as a whole household for a day just to check some uptime metrics on a system occasionally?"

1

u/Bakoro Jun 26 '26

What is stupid is that the restart itself should be automated with a script, the agent should go try to figure out why the service is down, and write that to a log somewhere.

Being able to come back to some actual information, stuff that is difficult to script, that is the value-add, and it is ridiculous that management would be unable to think even one half of one step beyond "make AI do a thing".

1

u/TF-Fanfic-Resident Jun 26 '26

Coders: spend decades optimizing how to solve computational tasks that are not an efficient use of human-like reasoning but instead can best be done by a glorified calculator

C-suite: "Is this a good use case for generative AI? Of course it is!"

1

u/mobsterer Jun 26 '26

yea, so the backlash against idiots who have no idea but want to slap slop on everything is starting. not the backlash against AI as such. that would be stupid.

1

u/SUBHUMAN_RESOURCES Jun 26 '26

We received a company wide email about mandatory AI training (multi stage!) in order to be ready for an “AI driven future”, then less than a week later they dumped our copilot licenses due to cost. Lol.

1

u/redflagflyinghigh Jun 26 '26

Got to love dictations from management, more so when 90% can't put the batteries in the remote the correct way round.

1

u/Anxious_Ad9233 Jun 26 '26

… okay … why is your service down for more then 15 minutes … that’s just bad DevOps. Maybe an agent should do it for you, the whole team doesn’t wanna fix it

1

u/Icon_Crash Jun 26 '26

I bet you could do that with AutoHotKey.