Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Been listening to the latest oxide and friends podcast (predictions 2026), and ugh, so much incoherent ai boosting.
They’re an interesting company doing interesting things with a lot of very capable and clever engineers, but every year the ai enthusiasm ramps up, to the point where it seems like they’re not even listening to the things they’re saying and how they’re a little bit contradictory… “everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”. There’s enthusing over llm law firms, without any awareness of the recent robin ai collapse. Talk of llms generating their own programming language that isn’t readily human readable but is somehow more convenient for llms to extrude, but also talking about the need for more human review of vibe code. Simon Willison is there.
I feel like there’s a certain kind of very smart and capable vibe coder who really cannot imagine how people can and are using these tools to avoid having to think or do anything, and aren’t considering what an absolute disaster this is for everything and everyone.
Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.
"The things that AI cannot do but the salespeople assure me it will In The Near Future™️ sure sound great, but the real negative effects it has right now are really bad. Gee, I wonder if there's some bigger picture to see here, huh."
I'm sure it's all meant to bolster a sales pitch to corporate clients that "this is YOUR AI, that YOU CONTROL!"
I've been wondering, since Rust has a more complex compiler that can take longer to run, and people are typically farming it out to a build/CI server anyway... are these otherwise accomplished vibe coders like Klabnik and the Oxide bros pursuing an experience similar to the REPL/incremental compilation of Lisp or Smalltalk? We've already discussed how the mechanics are similar to a slot machine, but if you can convince yourself you're getting a "liveness" that you wouldn't otherwise get with a compiled, rigorously type-checked language, you're probably more than willing to ignore all that. I'm curious, but not curious enough to go pin one of these people up against the wall, or start poking the slop machine myself.
AI puffery is easy for anyone to see through. If they're regularly mistaking for something of actual substance, their technical/business sense is likely worthless, too.
There’s room for some nuance there. They make some reasonable predictions, like chatbot use seems likely to enter the dsm as a contributing factor for psychosis, and they’re all experience systems programmers who immediately shot down Willison when he said that an llm-generated device driver would be fine, because device drivers either obviously work or obviously don’t, but then fall foul of the old gell-mann amnesia problem.
Certainly, their past episodes have been good, and the back catalogue stretches back quite some time, but I'm not particularly interested in that sort of discussion here.
I didn't know this had a name. Thank you!
@self they're doing it again, where's the link to your rant
cleaning the egg off my face (but egg prices are pretty high rn so i may just keep it)
thanks @swlabr@awful.systems for the link and @blakestacey@awful.systems for the skeptical post, my dumbass dropped the ball there
It was in fact @blakestacey@awful.systems : https://awful.systems/post/4099363/7113212
My bad!
Ugh, I carried to listening to the episode in the hopes it might get better, but it didn’t deliver.
I don’t understand how people can say, with a straight face, that ai isn’t coming for your job and it is just going to make everyone more productive. Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore), have they not noticed the vast sweeping layoffs in the tech industry alone, let alone the damage to other sectors? They seem to be aware that the promise of the bubble is that agi will replace human labour, but seem not to think any harder about that.
Also, Willison thinks that a world without work would be awful, and that people need work to give their lives meaning and purpose and bruh. I cannot even.
Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don't know and can't yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else's problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya...
I feel like one day that “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” thing will have to give.
@rook
I figure two things will happen:
a) In a year or two companies will realize that LLMs aren't going to improve enough, and that they need skilled people because AI has turned their software into a shit show, and start hiring desperately.
or
b) In a year or two LLMs will get good enough for code that the software developed is just good enough despite the deskilling effects, and companies can get by with drastically reduced staff.
The more likely version of b) is not that AI improves in any way, but that the definition of "good enough" gets degraded so much that no one will care.
My gloomy prediction is that (b) is the way things will go, at least in part because there are fewer meaningful consequences for producing awful software, and if you started from something that was basically ok it’ll take longer for you to fail.
Startups will be slopcoded and fail quick, or be human coded but will struggle to distinguish themselves well enough to get customers and investment, especially after the ai bubble pops and we get a global recession.
The problems will eventually work themselves out of the system one way or another, because people would like things that aren’t complete garbage and will eventually discover how to make and/or buy them, but it could take years for the current damage to go away.
I don’t like being a doomer, but it is hard to be optimistic about the sector right now.