Interesting perspective. As AI becomes more common in software development, choosing when not to use AI could become just as important as choosing when to use it
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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You'd think that "no AI" would be an easy feature to implement, and it's much in demand. Strange that it seems to be beyond the abilities of so many software developers.
It's more a question of agency than ability. Take this excerpt from the announcement:
For a company that sells subscriptions, an AI assistant justifies a price increase and strengthens the case for keeping all documents within its own infrastructure. The functionality and the business model reinforce each other, so integration is not only attractive but almost mandatory.
Anyone employed in such a company will have a hard time resisting. There's a mix of unrest and despair in the discipline right now. I've met colleagues drastically change careers over this. Sick leaves over mental health too.
It's mostly just management dictating from the top-down. I've heard everything from "it's our company's direction" to "investors are only funding AI expenses" and nothing actually grounded on (B2C) customer feedback.
With the important reminder that top-management people typically have the IQ of a beetle, or less.
You would be surprised how much "We need AI to take over the world completely or there is no chance in hell to ever get our insane investments back" motivates people to push bullshit on you.
I don’t think shots were intended to be fired at the Mozilla corporation, who can’t stop talking about their default, opt-out AI, but it paints a stark picture of the difference between a company that preaches privacy and choice, versus a company that actually provides those things.
I think they're also taking shots on telemetry. Firefox uses telemetry as evidence to support their decisions in ways that sometimes seem contrived or statistically incorrect (similar to only x% of people turned this default feature off, therefore it is good), making me feel as a user that contributing my telemetry to them is actually a bad thing that is encouraging their behaviour. Meanwhile TDF makes great software that follows what the community wants and needs without any telemetry collection.