I've been drafting a blog post in my head about AI for months, but my feelings are strong and my thoughts scattered. At the moment, when I hear the word "AI" my stomach clenches. So yeah, this is a pretty pessimistic/grumpy take, but I need to get it all off my chest before I can come up with anything with nuance.

My first real awareness of what we call AI today (LLMs) centered around art theft. Stealing authors' words and illustrators' styles with zero remorse. It was just a bunch of tech bros thoughtlessly taking from others so they can feel "Creative" and show off their fun new toy. Claiming that their technology is the future, don't try to resist, it's their right to steal from others. Sound familiar? Suffice it to say, this relationship started very poorly.

It has evolved into environmental degradation, the quickening enshittification of the internet, and better, more convincing scams then ever. CEO's mandating the use of AI as they lay workers off and burden workers with larger and larger workloads, as investors froth at the mouth at the idea of not having to employ anyone.

So as you might imagine, no—no I have not tried using AI agentic coding assistants. Just the idea of being forced to use these tools, whether by direct mandate or increasing work loads that are impossible to carry, makes me want to leave tech immediately. But at the moment, it's hard to imagine that this won't eventually be the case for everyone.

When you work in tech, you sign up for constant change—one of the core values of any software engineer/developer is continual learning. The tools we use are always evolving, so you must keep up or get out (or move up to management). Trust me, I know this—I was a Flash developer, so my main tool of choice fully disappeared from existence once already.

But what do I do when all things point to something that I find morally repugnant? What we call "AI" today is a large set of different tools, and it's a little naive to just bucket them all together and call them "bad". But lets be real—it's not really the tool itself, it's everything around it, and there is just no way to separate the tool from its context.

We're in the middle of the storm—the tools are new, investment is still pouring into anything with a sparkle emoji, and the destruction is only really starting to be realized. It's hard to say what anything will be like when the dust settles.

Don't get me wrong—there are plenty of ways that AI is actually helping society, like improving medical diagnosis. But from my small vantage point, it's main purpose seems to be ensuring no one has to have ideas or creative thought anymore, we just edit whatever garbage the machine gives us—which of course becomes a cycle of slop, since "generative" AI is just serving us back whatever we gave it in the first place.

My hope is that we quickly realize how Not That Great AI actually is for most things and we can all just chill. Including myself—because if I'm being honest, for career reasons, I will almost certainly have to use the tools to stay relevant in my industry. The only way I will be able to use these tools is if I am interested and curious about them—and at the moment, the only thing I feel is intense hatred.

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