An example from work a few weeks ago. I fixed some vibe coded UI code that had made it to prod. The layout of the UI was basically just meant to be an easy overview of information relevant to an item. The LLM had done everything right except it assumed a weird mix of tailwind and bootstrap, mixing and matching css classes from both. After I implemented the classes myself it went from a single column view to grids and nested grids grouping the data intuitively.
I talked with the dev who implemented it, and basically it was just something quickly cobbled together with AI until it was passable. The AI had added a lot of extra that served no function and that didn’t conform to a single css framework, but looked like it could. For months noone questioned it despite talk about that part of the UI needing a facelift.

I don’t know how representative it is, but about half the time I’m thoroughly confused about a piece of code and why it was written the way it was, the answer has turned out to be AI. And unlike when a developer wrote it, there rarely is any reason to have written it the weird way.

I think what makes enshittification is "give users less and charge more". It's about returning shareholder value instead of customer value.

Netflix is a great example. They have pulled back on content, made password sharing more challenging, and increased cost. They still report increases in paying users.

They've done the math. They know they can take lost in users because they know they'll make up for it. That's the sad part in all of this.

To be fair, 0.2 + 0.1 = 0.30000000000000004

Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.

He'll make all the stupid decisions. But they're only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.

From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say "See how that company is failing without me? That's because I bring value to the brand."

So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.

These actions aren't stupid. They're plotted corruption for the benefit of one.

That's what I suspect. ChatGPT is never wrong, and even if it doesn't know, it knows and still answers something. I guess its no different for source code: always add, never delete.

Hey there. Of course, I am in no position to say "do this, and it will be all right", but I will say that if there is any other way to live that won't put this kind of load on you - do it. You being happier is way way more needed in this world than you getting those certificates

Microsoft did the June layoffs we knew were coming since January and pinned it on "AI cost savings" so that doing so would raise their stock price instead of lower it.

This 1000x. I am a PHP developer, I found out about two months ago that the AI assistant is included in my Jetbrains subscription (All pack, it was a separate thing before). And recently found about Junie, their AI agent that has deep thinking (or whatever the hell it is called). I tried it the same day to refactor part of my test that had to migrated to stop using a deprecated function call.

To my surprise, it required only very minor changes, but what would've taken me about 3 hours was done in half an hour. What I also liked was that it actually asked if it can run a terminal command to verify thr test results and it went back and fixed a broken test or two.

Finally I have faith in AI being useful to programmers.

For a test, I took our dev exam (for potential candidates) and just sent it to see what it does just based on the document, and besides a few mistakes it even used modern tools and not some 5 year old stuff (like PSR standards) and implemented core systems by itself using well known interfaces (from said PSRs). I asked it to change Dependency Injection to use Symfony DI instead of the self-made thing, and it worked flawlessly.

Of course, the code has to be reviewed or heavily specified to make sure it does what it is told to, but all in all it doesn't look like just a gimmick anymore.

Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.

He'll make all the stupid decisions. But they're only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.

From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say "See how that company is failing without me? That's because I bring value to the brand."

So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.

These actions aren't stupid. They're plotted corruption for the benefit of one.

And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.

I can't think of any other options that don't end in the best case scenario of myself being elderly and destitute.

AI as it exists today is only effective if used sparingly and cautiously by someone with domain knowledge who can identify the tasks (usually menial ones) that don't need a human touch.

And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.