I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.
Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work.
I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem.
There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way.
Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived?
The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show.
I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
Journalists fear mongering and making sure the hoi polloi know their place as powerless pawns in a game they couldn't possibly understand is a constant.
They know what they're doing, the people who fund them know it and the people with half a working brain cell sooner or later hear someone like me and go 'oh, that explains it'.
It's much simpler than some mythical cycles - manufactured 'mass stupidity' is a conscious, deliberate, ongoing choice.
It used to be religious organizations, then it was newspapers, now its social media platforms. The playbook has been the same for thousands of years - nothing has changed.
If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected.
I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
Yeah, when you are pulling out terms of the very online like "meat proxies", you're not exactly in a place to judge the rest of society, you're in a bubble.
Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table>
Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.
AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.
I'm not the one here making assertions, I'm asking questions of the person making claims. I'll leave it to others to judge what is 'a lot' or 'reasonable'.
I don't think 'anyone who thinks X is Y' is a good basis for discussion, which is the real point.
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
You still have to grapple with the merits of their argument to find out if the indicator is correct or not.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy.
LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.
It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening.
It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.
> So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride.
Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables.
To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats.
(For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)
I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.
Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work.
This rings true.
I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem.
There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way.
Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived?
The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show.
I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
Journalists fear mongering and making sure the hoi polloi know their place as powerless pawns in a game they couldn't possibly understand is a constant.
They know what they're doing, the people who fund them know it and the people with half a working brain cell sooner or later hear someone like me and go 'oh, that explains it'.
It's much simpler than some mythical cycles - manufactured 'mass stupidity' is a conscious, deliberate, ongoing choice.
It used to be religious organizations, then it was newspapers, now its social media platforms. The playbook has been the same for thousands of years - nothing has changed.
If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected.
I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
Can I be both?
Absolutely!
Ironically this reads like output from an LLM trained exclusively on bluesky
Yeah, when you are pulling out terms of the very online like "meat proxies", you're not exactly in a place to judge the rest of society, you're in a bubble.
Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table> Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.
Table layout, my old friend!
AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
And what are you basing that understanding on?
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
According to EESI (a bipartisan-founded non-profit), a large data center:
> can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.
Also noting that AI datacenters can use more.
Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.
I'm not the one here making assertions, I'm asking questions of the person making claims. I'll leave it to others to judge what is 'a lot' or 'reasonable'.
I don't think 'anyone who thinks X is Y' is a good basis for discussion, which is the real point.
Consume it how, exactly? Are the staff drinking it all? Because the the kit sure as hell isn't. :-/
From the article:
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
datacenters are stinky though and ruin property values. (as well as can, and has, polluted water sources in some cases)
I don't disagree with your assertion; however you do have to realize that their grievances, while not completely informed, are not wrong.
Someone complaining about water usage is a very strong indicator that they aren't well-informed enough to contribute anything worth reading, though.
You still have to grapple with the merits of their argument to find out if the indicator is correct or not.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
The major hyperscalers report water use: Google consumed 10.9 billion gallons in 2025, up 34%, versus Amazon's disclosed 2.5 billion.
Thank you, I wasn't aware they did this:
https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmen...
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-...
I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy.
LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.
It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening.
It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.
I believe both extremes are right, because more than one thing can be true at once.
that we're creating god but that it's also a fad that will go away soon?
I think you just accidentally described what's already been happening for 7000+ years.
Artificial Unintelligence
> So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride.
Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables.
To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats.
(For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)
Alternative title: Cognitively tired unc goes on rant after experiencing change of job responsibilities
This is someone's vent post.
"has never been the bottleneck"
The tell of an unhinged anti AI rant that pulls only to the worst case most negative viewpoint.