Everyone is so annoying about AI — Cailin Pitt

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Skip to contentSomething I've recently been thinking about a lot is how I think public perception of AI would likely be vastly different (and positive) if the people at the forefront of the pro side weren't Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. In other words, extremely dumb and evil rich guys who somehow failed upwards in life.

Like most people, my initial feelings on AI were pretty negative. The pro-AI people reminded me of the Crypto people circa ~2021, but 10x more annoying (the Venn diagram of those two groups of people is probably a circle). I found their general vibe to be annoying, and I found Sam Altman et al. to be very irresponsible people with all of their "AI is going to replace jobs and completely change the world and global economy" talk. I understand AI company CEOs are in it for the money and thus they have to market their products, but something about the ways they've always tried to push the tides (human beings will be replaced) felt notably more dangerous and gross to me than past tech fads.

As a professional software developer I feel like I had a front row seat to watching AI and its effects for the past few years, especially since one of the earliest use cases of AI was to make it easier/faster to write code. LLM models continued to get better, AI companies continued to talk their shit about how entire job functions would be eradicated, and tech companies eventually started to mandate employee AI usage. The mandates were pretty wild to me because it felt like I woke up one day and out of the blue everyone was being heavily "encouraged" to use AI all the time or else , even non-tech white collar workers. At my former (I'll get to that in a bit) company we were given seemingly unlimited and unfettered access to any LLM we wanted, encouraged to ship things faster, and AI usage even became a performance metric for reviews and promotions. All of this happened within the span of 8-12 months.

I had started experimenting with AI for software development at work before the mandates started. My first use case was more for linting and code readability purposes – sometimes I'd write a method in Kotlin by hand but feel like there was a way I could use syntactic sugar to accomplish an operation in less lines of code. I'd copy my code block into the ChatGPT desktop app (lol), ask it to make my code cleaner, and then copy the result into my IDE if I felt like the result worked and made sense. I still found the pro-AI people to be annoying, but I was interested in giving a new technology a try and found it okay at handling my narrow professional needs at the moment.

As time went on I started to feel dread about AI and its effect on my industry and professional prospects. AI companies continued to push their rhetoric about LLMs being capable of writing code faster and better than human engineers. We started to see tech companies pause hiring because they wanted to experiment with using AI to write code instead of hiring humans. This eventually led to companies outright starting to lay off engineers because they felt LLMs were now capable enough to write code faster than them, at a cost that was cheaper than hiring humans. The layoffs scared me because I enjoyed my field and getting to write code for a living, but it started to feel like my days were numbered. During this, it was also pretty obvious to anyone with a functional brain that AI can't actually replace software engineers as there's more to building products than just writing a shit ton of code – AI doesn't always write working code, it isn't great at system design, it doesn't understand company org structures – but it felt like C-suite execs had drank too much of the kool-aid and now normal people who don't make seven figures were going to suffer. The layoffs continued across tech until eventually my company laid me off along with four thousand other people via an email on a random Thursday. I wasn't surprised to get laid off.

My initial thought after getting laid off because of AI was okay, I might be cooked. Even though on a personal level I didn't think AI could replace engineers, I figured the tech industry might be completely fucked for who knew how long and I even briefly considered the thought of trying to find a non-tech job. Ultimately it turned out companies with rational leadership weren't buying into the AI hype and I was able to find a sweet new job within a month, at a place that doesn't have AI usage mandates. It also turned out the tech CEOs who have been orchestrating AI mass layoffs immediately proceeded to eat shit and look incredibly stupid – AI productivity gains only appear to be 10% and not the 10x these shitheads had been claiming during board meetings. Lots of tech companies that did major AI layoffs have also been hiring back employees, and lots of companies are even mandating employee AI...