Opensource

Neoliberalism sure has poisoned our minds.

Despite what bosses and market pundits will tell you when they’re trying to underpay you, the value in a software development effort is not just the end product that you can sell to customers — it’s also the knowledge of how the codebase works, and how to modify it over time.

I’m not an ostrich when it comes to AI-powered development. I’ve been to multiple conferences and courses over the past year specifically about developing with AI. My Youtube and Substack and podcast history is multiple hours per day of content about AI news, practices, and opinions. My weekly visit to my bookstore has been mostly to pick up or place an order for books about AI. I use agents for my daily coding tasks at work. I have multiple local LLMs on multiple machines at home that I use from multiple harnesses. I have ralph loops, I have full-AFK workflows, I have custom sandboxes.

I could go on, but you get the point: I’m not standing on the sidelines when I say…

The vast majority of AI use today is horrifically irresponsible. Current AI use is digital asbestos in the walls of our technological society. It will take generations to fully recover from this. I am not excited, I’m not gonna “get over it”, and I’m not gonna grant any degree of false equivalence between actual FOSS and these slop stunts.

The bubble cannot pop soon enough. Not just so that we can minimize the economic damage, or so that hardware prices can once again experience gravity, but so that we can actually be honest about what this stuff is and how to use it.