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How did AI annoy you this week?
I'm pretty pro-AI generally, but I've been frustrated by a huge uptick in vibecoded applications that have some use, but are pretty unimpressive and not well thought out, for what they are.
E.g. people in my socials:
And I have a mess of feelings about it. On the one hand, we live in an age of technical wonders, and I'm glad people are discovering them. On the other, because we live in an age of technical wonders, the bar for quality has gone up so much in the last year or two, and these people seem to lack any self-awareness. The default vibe coded design tropes are immediately apparent in these apps, like how you can sense AI writing with em-dashes or "it's not X, it's Y!", or just its general tone. And like, it's fine. It's okay. The apps work, but they should be so much better.
It's not like I haven't vibecoded some turds. I've made websites and android apps and tools too. It's just that these are for me alone, or to be shared in person, if someone requested it. To release one to the public, the actual utility of the thing would have to be unimpeachable. Tracker website for <thing that is already tracked> does not meet that bar. Map of <thing that is already mapped> does not meet that bar. Yet another app doing the same thing as a hundred others does not meet that bar.
Not AI itself, but I did see someone on HN claim they feel like they are finally good at programming because of AI... then go on to say that they haven't written any code in months.
I recently remarked to a friend that I probably wouldn't care about AI if it wasn't causing people to act retarded. Whether through stunning displays or ignorance like the one I mentioned, corpos shoving it down my throat when I never asked for it, or the insane tech industry push that you simply must use it for work, the hype train annoys the absolute shit out of me. But it's really not the tech's fault - if not for people acting stupid I would just go "meh, not very useful to me" and move on with my life. As usual, humans ruin things.
I'm not exposed to this personally, but a lot of my acquaintances in the industry are. I think your use of "insane" really nails it. When was the last time a tool in software genuinely produced a huge efficiency gain but didn't see widespread, enthusiastic adoption by the rank and file? Hell, most of the time, leadership would try to keep it from us at first in cases like that. CI servers and hosted version control come to mind.
I'm old. I've experienced a similar tool that was shoved down my throat by management at an F-500 company because it was going to eliminate the need for programmers. It was Rational Rose, and it turns out its main value proposition was that executives got really nice dinners from the sales team.
Maybe it's different this time, but it sure seems familiar.
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