You have to remember that the current investment level assumes that somehow everyone is going to use the AI stuff that much. It won’t do if the only heavy usage is code generation.

This likely refers to the famous fictitious quote from Heny Ford that wanna-be self-important “innovators” like to trot out to show how they are smarter than the customer when they put out some unasked for bullshit.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

People like to imagine the car as some miraculous thing no one but a genius could have imagined wanting and the genius descending from on high and delivering. Truth was people could easily imagine and want it, the genius was in knowing how to make what people knew they wanted.

Instead, Henry Ford said: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”

So essentially the exact opposite of “screw the customers, we know better!”

It sounds like how students think professional sounds.

Well, also some executives that I can’t stand that, if I didn’t know better, would swear were ChatGPT for decades…

Though with the ability to not even have to think about synonyms and indirect references or foreign language or potentially if someone sent you a damn screenshot of a terminal output instead of the text…

I remember a news piece where they were interviewing someone about their renouned AI work that was not LLM related. The interviewer clearly struggled and while the person conducting himself well, you knew he had to be annoyed at having to explain his work had nothing to do with the chatbots, datacenter buildout, and related resource consumption.

This is a point that really sticks with me. Using it for the sometimes spot on cakewalk segments is a fairly productive win. By the time you stubbornly insist on driving it entirely blackbox with chat and trying to get the right results without actually touching code… Well, even when it works, it’s often more work than just doing it yourself.

Someone rebased a UI I worked on in a new version of the UI framework. As a result, there was this one odd gap in the UI in one specific place. A vibe coder spent 3 hours back and forth with the AI trying to get it to correct the gap and finally submitted their merge request. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of CSS. So I declined the merge request, open the gui, looked at the gap, hit f12, adjusted a single padding statement, and it was all good. People are struggling with defining all sorts of criteria and rigging it to let it try and try and try again and hopefully laid out every contingency, every corner case, and spent hours laying the ground work and could have done similar in a more straightforward way.

You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.

The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.

A key word in that sentence is “if”, it is a rhetorical example, that’s probably pretty much correct at this point. It’s not a recommended course of action, it’s a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn’t currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.

I would argue that the CEOs aren’t on the correct track, they aren’t really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was “well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are”. My response “I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level”. The “imagine a hundred years from now” by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that’s problematic.

Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.

I think it’s a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.

All the “everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality” refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it’s trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren’t good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to “net it out” to have any hope of the point landing.