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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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When they talk about "ai agents," are they referring to the so called autonomous bots, or bots that can enter your development environment? Like openclaw.
any usage of ai that allows it to execute tasks beyond simply outputting something to the user. if it interacts with stuff (especially with some degree of autonomy) it's an agent.
Got it. Why do people use agents? I've used vibe coding before, it is possible to copy-paste the boilerplate code you asked for, although you've got to then edit for about two hours...
I guess they found a use case. I kinda use Gemini as one sometimes for pulling stuff from a picture of a PowerPoint and putting it in my schedule or for aggregating info about a group of products I'm trying to choose between. personally I don't see much use for ai in general beyond menial stuff like that but that stuff actually is pretty nice aside from the whole 'destroying the environment, economy, and several industries' part. almost makes me want to get a computer that can run it locally just so I can try and find a use case without the destruction.
I don't actually think AI is doing all of those things. I think the economy is already fucked and AI is a scapegoat for companies who were going to lay off a bunch of people anyway. I don't think the water and electricity consumption compares to the meat industry, but I could be wrong. I think it's weird that there is such an outrage over AI but not cattle, but I guess because people like beef more than they like hallucinated AI results.
It's probably a good idea to self-host your own AI for privacy reasons alone, if you use it.
With VSCode say, it gives you a live diff for every change. Loads the file you're working on and any in the project it thinks it needs into context. Streamlines the process while (assuming you're not insane enough to set it to auto accept everything) keeping you in the loop to review changes.
Absolutely needs babysitting because if it twinges on the wrong stackoverflow post from 10 years ago or whatever it'll start asking for root access to modify drivers instead of modifying the php.
I don't use mine for coding, but it can be useful for editing stuff, since a lot of agent-based systems can edit parts of a file instead.
The thing I have it do sometimes is parsing a bunch of markdown files, and parse data to put into the middle of a CSV, so it's not out of order. Since making a script read the markdown is non-trivial, and itls not something that needs to be done very often, it's easier to run a local model on the same machine and have it do that. Past a point, re-generating the entire file isn't feasible, since it either consumes so many tokens doing the output that it hits the output limit that's usually in place to prevent looping, or it takes an incredibly long time.
Is AI good for anything other than boilerplate code though? I worry when people talk about databases.
First thing is to separate out the term AI from LLM's.
AI as a term encompasses many different technologies, some going back decades, a lot of which is used all over the place.
What we're hearing a lot about right now are LLM's and the surrounding ecosystem.
To answer the question though, yes, they can be used to produce output that fits a use case.
Whether or not it's the best tool for the job is subjective, even in the cases where it's technically viable.
There is a lot of bias and a lot of arguments for both sides.
You'd probably be best served by reading around a bit and figuring out how you feel about it.
You're unlikely to get an unbiased discussion from a single source, especially here.
I'm not excluding myself , I'm bias AF.
The technology is interesting, the industrial implementation is an environmental and societal catastrophe.
I can only speak to personal experience, which is admittedly limited
It depends. At least, I find that it has a habit of falling on its metaphorical face if the task is anything more complex than the simplest things, so the idea that people can use it to make viable programs is baffling to me.
"Put these values into the CSV" works okay enough, but if you task it with more than that, like see if a column of values in the CSV is entered correctly from the markdown, it breaks.
Or it gets stuck in a loop, and there's a very short point where it is faster to enter it by hand. Slightly ironic, though, that a language model doesn't do too well with natural language processing.
I'd certainly not trust it for anything important like a production database, but the csv/markdown thing isn't, and it's no big deal if it gets destroyed by the model/agent, so it's interesting to poke around with, and feel out the limitations, so you know its strengths and weaknesses.
Anyone who says yes is clearly not knowledgeable. Its like asking a spaghetti developer if they think their code is good. AI Physcosis is unlocking a new incompetence fear in me.
It's absolutely fine at some stuff, provided you know enough to spot any mistakes it might make.
Just because you can do it with an LLM, doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job.
?
I would imagine anything that allows an LLM to interact with something outside of a chat, whether an agentic coding platform like codex/Claude code or autonomous system like openclaw
That makes sense.