this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Thing is, in any industry, you need a combination of new blood and old wisdom in order to successfully pass the torch to the next generation. Old wisdom is expensive to keep around, but the cheap new blood doesn't know what they need to in order to succeed.
When you get rid of all your old wisdom and hire all new blood to cut costs, they're going to come in with a series of footguns that old wisdom knows how to avoid. If you're lucky, the new blood is going to learn about those footguns primarily by shooting themselves with them and then scrambling to fix the big problem that follows. If you aren't lucky, said footgun blows the entire leg off your corporation and you implode, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
All this to say, no, they probably don't know. A million companies elected to excise all of their knowledge and replace it with fresh-faced, eager, noticeably cheaper juniors.
Now there's nothing wrong with hiring juniors, but you can't just put 30 of them in a room and say "alright, monkeys, get to writing Shakespeare" - they lack 30+ years of practical knowledge, and as mentioned, juniors all ship with footguns pre-installed. You need someone who is able to steer the ship properly. A good senior dev is worth his weight in gold. However, most companies don't want to pay a senior dev his weight in gold. Observe the consequences.
It's especially egregious in IT. I think Uncle Bob had some statistics about how many new people are introduced to the field all the time and how that effectively dilutes wisdom and experience and there is a real challenge to try to train those people in useful ways.
The problem, in practice, is that pretty much the clock starts at about age 25 where people start thinking you are "too old" to do IT and it ratchets up every year to try to push you out.
The net effect is as you say - lots of eager beavers wanting to try something new and shiny but not too much wisdom and experience left (or if they are, they are mostly sidelined).
So then you get lots of stupid rookie shit going on, nearly constantly. People that probably never even heard of Mythical Man-Month (and if they did, probably think it's not worth reading because, well, what would someone that came before even know about this industry) chomping at the bit to get a second-system effect going on working system(s) (rewrite it in Rust), for example.
We all got to see this at the national level where you saw fElon's boys making proclamations about rewriting COBOL systems refined over the course of decades into Java in mere months. Because "AI". That's of course sheer fucking lunacy, but the industry is known for give adulation to bold bullshit proclamations like this.