One of the things that makes me very sad about AI is the quality dropping all over the place and nobody really seems to care? At least no where near the amount of people I would have thought.

There are people I've worked with for years that were very good at their job. They were always proud of everything they did and took the time to do stuff right instead of half-assing a job. But then they started using AI and just press the easy button on everything they do. I'm pretty sure some of them no longer have the skills they once had and would take 5-10 years to get back to where they were. The quality of the output has been dropping steadily and my pushback on the quality hasn't been welcome and AI has been blamed for mistakes. Like my dude, just because you pressed the AI button doesn't mean you are no longer responsible. The AI didn't fuck up, you fucked up, you are supposed to check the AI output. It's still your work, even though you let the AI do all of the work. Management has been praising the increased output, even though I feel the only reason there's more output is because the quality has dropped. Instances where a 4 hour job takes 20 mins are heralded as the best thing since sliced bread. But there are so many instances where a job gets sent back multiple times, because it was simply wrong and terrible. But that's labeled as me being picky or hating on AI just because it's AI. And there have also been times someone was hard stuck because the AI couldn't do what we needed and I needed to take over the task.

I feel like the odd one out, not praising AI and pushing back. I wouldn't have thought so many people, especially people I used to respect a lot, would become so in love and addicted to AI. In a couple of years our code base is going to be totally fucked and nobody is going to be able to get it back.

Tech has been my passion my entire life and for the first time I feel like I might not be a fit for tech anymore. I want to be proud at something I created, not take credit for pushing the "Do the thing" button. I want to craft my own code, not be a sloperator or "prompt engineer". Hardware has become so expensive, my current computer looks like my last computer for at least the foreseeable future. And it seems like I'm the crazy one out, with everybody being happy with the slop the AI shits out.

I used to teach Computer Science at university, long before the "AI boom". Even back then, we were overloaded with students who had no true passion for technology or science but were there only because they had been told it's a good career move. They were convinced by their parents or schoolteachers that tech is a high paying, high status job like law or medicine.

When they graduated and actually went to get a job they realized the market was already saturated with others like them - who had rushed into an IT degree and a career that they didn't really enjoy.

Some will say: good, fuck ‘em. In the 2010s, Knowledge Workers told everyone to learn to code while they sipped kombucha and played Xbox in beanbag chairs. Then, Knowledge Workers sat inside during the pandemic while frontline workers risked their health to make Amazon and Uber Eats deliveries. Now, those same Knowledge Workers are building AI that threatens to eliminate work for humans across industries and make a very few people wealthy beyond imagination. And these same assholes want pity now?

No coders I knew in the 2010s were telling others to "learn to code" because they already knew the above - tech was already oversaturated with graduates in the 2000s. We were telling students to do what you are talented and/or passionate about. It's only pundits and posers like Musk who tell people to "learn to code".

On the other hand, the people who actually do have a passion for science and technology are burnt out because of the commercialization of tech. They want to work on interesting tech that makes people's lives better, not add features to products that will sell more licenses. The article's discussion of "Workism" encapsulates some of this, but all the problems it describes were still there many years ago before the "threat of AI".

Hear me out, it became bad once the business people realized how much money is in there. They started squeezing.

Never let business people touch anything.

Besides suffering from a heavy 'bullshit jobs' problem tech is the new 'I was just following orders'.

'I was just writing code. I had no idea I was writing code for the baddies!'

Cuz ram is expensive!