Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this...)
So it's been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year's work in 1 hour
So... Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It's almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
The AI shills would say: Are you still using the models from six months ago? Because the new models are sooo much more powerful.
I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)
A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass "Have you ever coded with a frontier model?"
Have you ever tried meth, tho?
yea you just don't have enough experience, I do bath salts every week and I promise you productivity gets a huge boost after week 5
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
you just know one of these guys has microdosed bath salts out of sheer contrariness
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., there's really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesn't seem to be happening.
The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.