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Revenge of The Business Idiot
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this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Right, LLMs shouldn't impress anyone with their output. It's a form of automation and that typically means less effort going into quality of the product. It's the difference between artisanally crafted item and something that's produced at industrial scale on an assembly line.
Industrial scale assembly lines at least have the virtue of consistency. That's one of their main benefits: you get the same thing at the same quality every time. LLMs don't even get you that.
Sure, but the idea with AI is precisely to tackle problems that don't have a formalized set of steps available. And there are ways to do verification of the work they do. For example, if you create a strict specification for what the end result should look like then you can treat the LLM the same way as a genetic algorithm, where it will eventually converge on the desired output using a feedback loop. So, it's not that this tech is inherently useless.
No argument from me. It absolutely has its uses--some potentially really significant--and "Attention is All You Need" and the subsequent literature very much is a landmark development in automation. It's just terrible for like 97% of the use cases it's being pushed for right now, as well as being developed with the explicit goal of actively making the world worse (because it's under the control of the world's worst guys, for the most part). If this tech were genuinely open, being developed responsibly, and used for the things it is genuinely good at without being shoved into applications it isn't good for, it could definitely solve some problems.
Oh yeah completely agree. We're in a midst of a huge financial bubble here, and the vast majority of these companies are either solving problems that don't exist, or selling snake oil. I'm pretty optimistic with what's happening with this tech in China where it is being developed largely in the open, and being applied in much more sensible way from what I can tell.
I've been reflecting on this since management at my workplace has been heavy handedly pushing AI tooling over the past year. I think there might be a difference between software and the type of products the industrial revolution ramped up the production of, and I'm curious to see how it stands under scrutiny.
Mass produced products necessarily have a certain quantity of them produced. For example, a certain quantity of refrigerators need to be produced for everyone who wants one to get one; a certain quantity of nuts and bolt need to be created to create machines with them; a certain amount of ore needs to be extracted to process into various different parts. Whether or not a mass produced product is as high quality as an artisanally crafted equivalent matters little if not enough of them are produced to satisfy demand.
The way the above type of product is quantified doesn't map well onto software, where subscriptions, advertisement, and data collection make the big bucks. The closest we get to the old ways nowadays would be digital media but, even then, the unit being sold doesn't exist as an independent unit until it is sold. In contrast, a product produced at a factory still exists as an independent object even before it reaches the store floor. Even in the days when software was distributed on floppy discs and CDs, the actual unit that reaches the consumer is the physical medium; the software didn't need to be written 100 times to sell 100 CDs. Development organizations can scale to have many different teams work on an application, but more software doesn't produce more units the way it does for physical products.
I believe at least some of the bourgeoisie are looking at AI as being similar to innovations in the means of production during the industrial revolution. That is, they plan to use the "enhanced" productivity of AI to make their workers produce more in the same amount of hours. This also reduces the initial knowledge the job needs, meaning more potential employees are competing for the same position, meaning employers don't need to pay as much or offer as many benefits to stay competitive.
This seems to be what's happening in my own workplace. In an address management made about AI adoption, one of their sections was titled "A Bigger Department Without Hiring a Bigger Department". In another, a manager said that a major goal of AI adoption is to say "yes" more (i.e., yes to implementing more of the features asked of us since we'll be able to work so much faster with AI). An online training course I took for AI started with an example of a manager demanding an employee to create an entire production ready microservice and posited AI as a solution to get it done; the unreasonableness of the manager's order isn't even acknowledged. This, I reckon, is why so many employers are so eager to go AI-first.
What I'm left wondering is if labor-saving machines lower socially necessary labor time for software production in the same way they do with physical products. Admittedly, I only made it 100-200 pages into Capital before bouncing off several years ago, so I definitely need to revisit it and strengthen my grasp on Marxist economics, but I can't help but suspect there's some relevant difference between digital and physical commodities that needs to be accounted for if recent developments in capitalism are to be understood.
I think you're correct that it's what they're hoping to do. The premise with AI is that companies could retain a handful of workers who will drive these tools to do the work of entire departments. In this sense, it would be like moving from artisanal mode of production to factory work. Instead of having each piece of code written by a human, you leverage automation with the human only having to know how to operate the tool that does the bulk of the work.
The problem with this model is precisely what @Philosoraptor@hexbear.net pointed out, which is that unlike machines in a factory, an LLM is not a deterministic tool. On top of that, the nature of work it automates is such that it requires active decision making, hence why it hasn't been automated so far. And here's where the whole scheme falls apart because the LLM is unable to actually determine whether something is correct in a business sense. All they do is produce stochastically probable outputs, which means human is the bottleneck in the whole process. You can get an LLM to generate code orders of magnitude faster than a human could, but somebody has to figure out that it's actually doing what's intended.
Some productivity gain is possible here. For example, you can focus on making specs, and tests, treating the code produced as a black box and testing the product functionally. But, all of these things still require a non trivial amount of work. So, the gains are marginal in the end, and that's why we see every report coming back from companies that went all in on this tech that they're not seeing the results they were hoping for.
While I think that this tech has value, and it can do a lot of useful things, it simply doesn't do what people marketing it claim it does. So, the analogy with factories works in a sense that the product is produced through automation rather than being crafted by hand, but it doesn't translate into the same type of productivity gains due to the human still being the main bottleneck in the whole process.
That's definitely an important issue regarding making things with LLMs. Deterministic tools like compilers and LSPs didn't cause as much of disruption to the industry to my knowledge, even if they did have their naysayers. The human bottleneck issue isn't what I was trying to get at, though.
I'm trying to look at it from production of software all the way to its consumption. My suspicion is that the differences between software and physical products -- both in how they are produced and how they are consumed -- might have an effect on how surplus value is extracted and how that effects the organization of society at large that is, in some ways, qualitatively different than what happened during the industrial revolution.
If my hypothesis sounds vague, that's because it is. I'll definitely need to finally read Capital in full at least.
I'm not sure that software fundamentally changes the dynamic between fixed capital and variable capital. Workers do often own their own computers and using open source tools. In that sense, there is a difference from a factory where the capitalist owns the press. But I think we need to ask what really counts as the means of production in software.
The real bottleneck is distribution, hosting, and access to users. A developer can write code on their own machine using free tools but they cannot deploy it at scale without cloud services like AWS. They cannot reach users without app stores or corporate owned repositories. They cannot monetize their work without payment processors owned by capital. The open source code itself often depends on infrastructure maintained by capital backed foundations or corporate employees.
So the means of production in software are the servers, the networks, the data centers, the authentication systems, the advertising platforms, the app stores. All of those are owned by capital. The worker's personal computer becomes like a craftsman's tool in the putting out system. It looks independent but it is actually subordinated to capital's control over the marketplace and the essential infrastructure.
That means the underlying relation has not changed. Capital still exploits labor for surplus value by controlling access to the means of producing and distributing value. Software just makes that control more abstract and more centralized. Software just makes the means of production cheaper to reproduce and more abstract. That actually strengthens capital's hand because it can amass enormous fixed capital in the form of code and data with near zero marginal cost. And the bottleneck is still labor since someone has to build and maintain the software. I'd argue that the extraction of surplus value just becomes more opaque, and the user becomes a source of data and training material. That is just an evolution of industrial capitalism rather than a qualitative break from it. The real difference might be that software allows capital to bypass traditional labor relations altogether by turning users into unpaid workers. That is a new twist but the underlying logic of accumulation remains intact. Read Capital for sure but also consider how the platform economy updates Marx's categories rather than overturns them.
I didn't mean to do otherwise. What you say is true though. This definitely isn't a qualitative break with industrial capitalism in the same way the financialization that happened/is happening for more than a century is a qualitative break with it.
yup