Please stop the AI Confidence Theater - by Elena Verna
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Please stop the AI Confidence Theater<br>We don’t need an extra reason to be anxious
Elena Verna<br>Jul 02, 2026
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AI headlines never disappoint. First, AI was killing education (oh the good ol’ days, I miss thee). Then we moved on to eliminating writers, engineers, designers, product managers, and sales jobs - I believe in that exact order. Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Google, with its precious SEO, was on the chopping block because of AI. Then we decided to collectively eliminate SaaS. We didn’t, but the stock market believed it and lots of people lost $$$. Now we are in the middle of everyone and their mother needing an AI agent, because you are def missing out on a life changing experience if you don’t have one. And yet… 99% of people don’t even know what an AI agent even does.<br>Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.<br>Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. I strategize with it. I build products with it. I write with it. I analyze data with it. But even I feel like everyone else has cracked the AI code while I’m still using some basic tutorial version over here.<br>So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’<br>And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude. Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.<br>It turns out that’s a super short list.<br>But the noise continues on volume 11/10.<br>So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.<br>(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
It is screwing a lot of stuff up
This fake AI hype is hurting all of us. This is not a victimless crime.<br>The reality distortion hurts innovation
The AI headline chasers and fakers are robbing people of a real, cool Ah-ha moment with AI tools that could get them excited and bought-in. The problem is when you see someone talk about their ‘life-changing’ (it’s always ‘life-changing’) new AI-powered system but… it doesn’t actually work. So you just assume that all of the AI stuff is BS and keep your head in the sand.
And instead of celebrating the saved time and reduced annoyance that AI actually can do right now, people are out here promising employee-replacing super agents… despite the fact that their agents only trigger 50% of the time and only deliver decent outputs if hand-fed very specific context (and get shit wrong most of the time)<br>This weird reverse-hustle hustle culture?
I didn’t have ‘Kind of misses toxic hustle culture’ on my 2026 bingo card and yet, here we are. Because now we have an even more toxic environment.<br>Five years ago, people wanted you to think they worked harder than everyone else. Today they want you to think AI does it all.<br>Five years ago, people shared and bragged about big outcomes: revenue, user milestones, fundraising, headcount. Today people are just highlighting how many tokens they’re burning. Everyone wants you to believe they have an invisible team of AI employees running their business while they think big thoughts. But where are those business outcomes, tho?!?
Five years ago, people bragged about waking up at 5am, doing cold plunges, having inbox zero, and working while endlessly Peletoning. Now it’s all about having 17 agents, not opening email, and AI running your business. It’s the exact same performance, just with different props.<br>Hiring for real expertise is a mess
This has also blown up the hiring process. AI has made average intelligence incredibly cheap and it has given everyone the vocabulary of expertise. It used to be that if someone started talking about vector databases, MCP, agents, memory, or RAG you assumed they knew what they were doing. Today, everyone knows the words. AI regurgitates some smart one-liner for them and 3 hot takes. Everyone sounds like they have an experience.<br>But sounding competent and being competent are completely different things. So how do you hire in the middle of that? Not that the old interview and hiring process was so great - I’ve been frustrated with it for years. But verbal interviews for real don’t work anymore. Just because you can ‘confidently’ explain MCP...