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Yeah, personally, I've never bought into the AI hype at all. Everything I've ever tried to use it for, it promptly shits the bed on, so I just dismiss it as worthless.
But even in an alternate universe where I'm the crazy one and everyone else is sane, there are severe problems with trusting this stuff: first, you're de facto ceding control over your technical infrastructure to a third party (run by exactly the sort of people who say stuff like "idk, they trust me. dumb fucks"). Yes, yes, you're supposed to religiously check the output before committing, not let it execute unsafe commands in a privileged environment, yada yada. I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya. Second, there is existing precedent for tech services being intentionally made worse to increase usage: for example, Google intentionally made Google search worse by doing things like disabling spell check so that users would have to search multiple times to find the result they were looking for, thus "increasing usage" (yes, this is from an actual court document lol). As OP and plenty of other smart people have noted, there is is a trivially obvious incentive and mechanism for this to be done with LLM coding agents. Just make the agent worse so people have to use more tokens!
If they're going to enshittify the AIs, it'll have to happen after one company gets sufficient market dominance that swapping to a different one isn't trivial.
And we're not at that point yet. If anything, the competition is at its fiercest right now. People seem to be willing to drop one product for another if they notice any tiny loss of performance.
I've mostly stuck it out with GPT so far, but I can't see any way they could lock me in hard enough that I wouldn't leave if it was obvious their model was consistently 10% 'stupider' than the alternatives.
Microsoft already had Copilot start inserting ads into pull requests without consent a week or two ago, I think that counts as enshittification.
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