Are these people tactical or are they idiots?
Like every other software company these days, my company has been pushing all of us to use AI for everything. Don’t write code, let AI do it. Don’t message each other, let AI do it. Don’t think, just let AI do it. From what I can tell this has divided people into different factions.
There’s a group of really smart engineers who use AI as a glorified search feature, maybe sometimes use it to help with their task, and move on. There’s a group that’s using AI to get some of their work done but still notice that its terrible at a lot of things and lean into those spaces. I’m in this second group. And then there’s the third group which’s been the bane of my existence lately. The shills.
I have a coworker that leaned into AI heavily when we first got access to it. He’d talk about AI and Andrei Karpathy and LLMs and Claude and OpenAI and Elon and Dario and GPT and Opus and Haiku and Mythos and Fable. He’d hunt for low hanging fruit tasks and get it done quickly and then would talk about how his AI has many mini AIs running and he’s the master of all of these AIs. He’s built projects, knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, graph projects, knowledge projects, graph graphs, knowledge knowledges, and project projects. He gives them cool names like neo, or cortex, or brainiac, or his most recent one Ultron. He’s operating as a 100x engineer, and every town hall meeting he gets a shoutout about how amazing he’s been and how every other team needs to learn from him and how he’s the perfect employee.
The thing is, he isn’t the only person like this. There are so many people in my company who lean into the AI thing. The other day we had a meeting of the bigwig devs at our company talking about how they don’t look at messages anymore, they have claude running on a loop reading and replying for them. And they recommended that the rest of us lower down the totem pole folks do the same. Why read? Claude can do everything anyway.
Someone recently made the mistake of saying we should use AI only when needed. They ostracized him so quickly, I see him eating lunch alone these days. I bring up the fact that I can do something in 2 minutes that takes AI atleast 30 minutes and I’m told that its not the "Company way". I’ve noticed people losing their attention spans these days. in a meeting recently one guy proclaimed that he’s testing out the new smartglass transcription feature and that he’s excited for the meeting. I caught him sleeping 10 minutes in.
People throw huge walls of text when I ask them a question and when I point out that something contradicts what I see, they stop responding to me. My manager was having a meltdown recently because he saw AI do something that he thought was revolutionary. It read a file and made a coherent sentence. Which he could have read himself, but he couldn’t be bothered. People make huge changes now that AI can do everything and somehow the humans that review these changes are the bottleneck. “Just use AI”, they say. “But start a new session because it will be a completely different AI reviewing your code”. Why don’t I slap you with my left hand and act like idk what happened because I’m right handed.
And the models. Every other day someone is like “Bro did you see the news about
Which brings me to my question, are people idiots or are they tactical? One explanation I have for this is that people know what they’re doing and they’re doing it anyway because they could come out on top. And this makes me sad for myself and the world I raise my kids in. Are we that selfish that we would go to any lengths to get ahead in life? That we wouldn’t look at our neighbors plate and make sure that they have something to eat before we gobble up our 15 course meal?
The other explanation I have is that people are idiots. They saw this shiny thing and sold everything and their offspring for it because they saw all the shiny things the shiny thing was creating. They see a post longer than 3 lines and they can’t read it. They don’t know how to read it. But they still want the credit that someone who reads it gets. But how? Ah lets prompt AI to “Summarize this and give a thoughtful response. Remember to sound more human, I don’t want those people to know I didn’t read what they’re saying.” And they feel better, they got the cake without the baking. Baking is for losers anyway, its the cake that matters. They say its too much effort to learn something in order to do something. They care about the final product, who cares how they got it? We all die at the end anyway, who cares how we get there? Might as well just kill ourselves now. But we don’t. At least, most of us don’t. Because we care to live. And if you can care to live, you can care about the impact you’re having getting to where you want to go.
The last explanation I have is that people are scared. Scared that saying no and standing up to people in power will crush them. That they have mouths to feed and lives to live and its a tradeoff they are forced to make. Maybe they’ve been made fun of for trying and failing at something and they’re embarrassed enough to try anything that makes them more normal.
It really really sucks that society has come to a point where some of us have to decide if we want to have morals or a life. I have no answer to this problem. One of the reasons I started blogging is because I saw it as an act of defiance. Where I could speak my mind and I wouldn’t have to be scared. Where I’d find other people. Passionate, smart, interesting, hardworking, but scared. And maybe by finding each other, we could all be a little braver.