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Please stop the AI confidence theater

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Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#101

Post by adam_arthur »

romaniv wrote: post #36

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis. A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code. The psychology b…

AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.

The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).

But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.

Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.

It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.

I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.

If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#102

Post by kylecazar »

john_strinlai wrote: post #79
tavavex wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

> I wonder how most of them sleep at night. i hate marketing . but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity. or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes. (edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someo…

8 hours a day, 5 days a week is a pretty significant chunk of your life. It is a part of your identity, if the word identity means anything.

Unless you are severed, of course.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#103

Post by its_ethan »

ModernMech wrote: post #83
ghusto wrote: post #72

> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing. - I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them - I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore - I don…

> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart > Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.

It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha".

The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day".

Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#104

Post by nikanj »

tavavex wrote: post #78
AaronAPU wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#105

Post by ingvay7 »

> Marketing, Finance, and HR

Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#106

Post by tavavex »

CPLX wrote: post #77
AaronAPU wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things. You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of…

By that definition, any form of philosophy or politics are subcategories of marketing. It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something for money.

To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long since moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#107

Post by heresalexandria »

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right.

While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down.

Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do.

It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#108

Post by cat_plus_plus »

AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#109

Post by nikanj »

postalcoder wrote: post #96

Ok I'll take the bait. > Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one. Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later: > And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know t…

Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power...

The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#110

Post by bwfan123 »

romaniv wrote: post #36

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis. A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code. The psychology b…

> fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing

There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.

In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.

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