This is my skinner box! It was made for me!A while ago I started going to this local open source meetup. It looks like this: you meet up with a maniple of people that seem to share the same disease that keeps you up at night writing on the computer and you spend a day hacking on open source projects and bantering and bonding over technical preferences, bad job experiences, or a specific anime you watched roughly 16 years ago.In the morning we'd all get a coffee at the local bar and have a bit of a chat, then we'd go to the coworking space that was hosting us, we'd all sit around a table, and declare what we wanted to work on for the day. People used to work on all sorts of projects: linters, open source Android apps, devops tooling.Then, a few months ago, I started noticing a concerning trend. Most of these updates started involving LLM harnesses, tokens, subscriptions, and all those fun things you read about when you open Hacker News. Most of the discussions around coffee and lunch tables also turned to these topics. Most of the people spent half of the day trying to use AI to get AI harnesses working so that they could use AI to do... what exactly? I'm not completely sure. It feels like watching college students spending days on their r/unixporn productivity setup so that they can rice even more efficiently.I'm unfortunately no stranger to the AI craze. I work at a company built upon machine learning and, recently, built with machine learning. I just had to listen to a town hall that ran overtime due to a 20+ minute presentation led by one of our very own "AI champions" imparting their AI prompting knowledge to the unwashed masses of AI runner-uppers.Of course, I'm an AI champion myself. I was spared from the last two rounds of layoff in part due to my token usage statistics from the last few months. I'm a reverse centaur of the finest sort. I have to be because I need a job to pay for my rent and my therapy.I just find it all so boring.As a white guy just hitting my 30s I'm obviously planning to start my own podcast, so I started listening to a few established podcasts as research. Search Engine is one of my favourites, and in one of their most Panic World-flavoured episodes you can listen to an anthropology of gooning. I found this episode to be a very interesting insight in the mind of the lost millenial.Research shows that the most unhinged form of the ideal (in the Plato sense) gooner is that of a guy wanking in front of a firehose that pumps pornographic content into their retinas with such force that it breaches the brain and induces a state of euphoric dopaminic ecstasy. The skinner box to end all skinner boxes. I think there's a connection to be drawn to AI usage here.Each turn of the conversation you're either hit with a wave of dread, because the AI did such a bad job and it deleted your kubernetes pods containing your database that you did not back up and it was such a bad boy, or you're hit with a wave of euphoria, because the AI ran that git command just right with arguments you would only have found if you spend 13 minutes reading the man page. It's basically like refreshing twitter.What I'm trying to imply here is that AI companies are doing to the programmer brain what social media companies have been doing to the normie brain for the last 10 years. They've built an operant conditioning chamber that fits me just right; they've built me a Junji Ito hole that was made for me and I'm gonna jump into it and I'm gonna come out the other end looking like a deformed monstrosity who spends all day building more productive harnesses to build more productive harnesses to build more productive harnesses to build more productive harnesses to build more productive harndessnes to builasd nmore productvaie hardnes au tand proucata harnens mo build nomroqa abuodit ve harndesse abto build ntmore aboreamcisge harnedsas tbto abild morean oteoai sdauiornehless ento rnmor abuilre amoracutive hanroasocigie arhagocisautoeamvayhaojtsnf ruagwroapfoagoiahfoaugosifalhfadohyfgapui