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for the haters - bad news, i am afraid. literally every Fortune 500 company is using AI to develop their products and services. in many cases they're no longer even doing manual code review. i hate to break it to you, but if you won't use services built using AI you just checked out of modern life.

i mean I appreciate the desire to do that. Late stage capitalism fucking sucks, in many many ways. The theft of IP is gross, the environmental arguments against AI are quite reasonable. We need jobs to live. But just saying I won't ever use anything that touched AI doesn't seem realistic.

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i won't be an apologist for the excesses of the AI bro revolution, but I am a pragmatist and a realist. We have to deal with the reality of the situation as it is, not just how we'd like it to be. It's my job to track software and I fucking love software developers and developer culture.

Even for the folks who want to shut it all down and put the genie back in the bottle, I’m not sure they’re fluent in the current state of the industry. Just having a clear-eyed look at where things stand is pretty clarifying. I’ve seen if shift people into harm reduction vs abolition.

it's got to be reduction. we need regulation. we need to think carefully about the social safety net, and the role of creativity and creatives as social glue.

your pain and feelings shouldn't be discounted. many devs are feeling grief right now, for lost craft and agency, while others are high as kites on LLM dopamine and stock options. but yeah, I don't want to leave the tech future to the fascists, so I feel like we kind of need to engage.

I hate AI slop. I hate AI art. I hate AI music. Writing is definitely best left to humans. But in the field of software development, we've hit a revolutionary tipping point. 2026 is the year when the models became good enough to solve hard problems autonomously. this is the new reality.

Are any of the AI vendors even close to making any money though? And if the customers are charged the real cost, would it be cheaper to hire a decent programmer? Or are we past that point now? (Genuine question, as I’m too long out the industry to keep up with it all)

2026 is when we got good enough at context and harness engineering to get enough out of the november 2025 models that they can do significant things in coding and operations (and math and elsewhere); most devs who don't live on the bleeding edge are probably still working out how to incorporate that

it's frankly absurd to say anyone using AI tools is bad or evil, and as others have commented, bullying people off this network as a badge of honour is a pyrrhic victory. have you seen what the other place does to people's brains? much better to have them here, among us, for all our flaws.

OTOH, this feels like one of the cases that @lessig.bsky.social referred to way back when as (iirc) "extremism in one side engenders extremism in the other", but... Much of the anti-AI behavior scans as people looking for a random dev they feel they can dogpile and bully online. And fuck that.