2026-10-26
TL;DR I hate AI. You used it? It shows. It looks like shit.
This isn’t really structured, but I like putting my thoughts out there. It’s a bit of a ramble. Yes, this is about AI… I bet that’s a real shocker.
I’ve been programming since I was maybe like 12? 11? I don’t know, it was somewhere in there. In the last 15-17 years, what I’ve programmed has changed a lot. I started out making crappy scripts on Roblox, and thought one day I’d be making video games that people played. I didn’t. Instead, I constantly shifted around my interests, and I dabbled in many many areas of coding.
The dabbling honestly brought me a lot of problems, but that’s more of a personal quirk of struggling with my identity, and trying to identify too heavily with my hobbies and interests. But I think struggle is really important, it also gives a lot of reason. It’s kind of like how creativity really flourishes whenever there are constraints. And of course, I look back on it all very fondly.
Towards the end, I did gravitate more towards simplicity, and just not overthinking shit (having a more grounded perspective?).
Ramble ramble ramble. Something something something.
Yeah, so AI is just making it all a hot mess. I’m not going to rehash that. You’ve heard. You know.
Ok, well maybe some parts I am? But I don’t hear much of this spoken about. Often, I just hear about, like, specific incidents? Think CVEs, adobe whatever, bots running wild, etc.
More background: I have never once programmed using AI, and I outright refuse to use it for anything.
People I worked with… that’s a different story all together. It’s very isolating.
While at work, no one…
Also, not as an ego stroke, but from an external perspective. AI only really sped up the slowest worker who didn’t give a rat’s ass about quality in the first place (their garbage would get stuck in the PR hellscape, anyway… so…). My colleagues who were already skilled prior, had marginal speed increases (sometimes?) and reduced quality output (unfortunately).
I never found myself being particularly outpaced by any of them, and I certainly never felt like they were producing something better (very much the opposite). At least until it was having negative effects on my motivation to continue working in software.
On that previous point, I have resigned fully from working as a software engineer at this point in time.
Also, general integrity and quality of most things has gotten worse. Enshittification? That one.
There is now minimal cost to making something. Which cheapens everything. The layman does not give a fuck about the craftsmanship, maintainability, etc. This is a general AI-generated content comment. AI-generated menus are very off putting to someone who cares about how things look, but the average 57 yo. arguing getting passive aggressive comments from his wife in a Chinese restaurant? Nah. And he’s the 80%.
This is also your manager in a workplace. He has KPIs and other useless things to hit. You complete a story by X time? It gets through testing? Released? Great. Next!
My experience with it all is that it was very human. It was never scientific, very opinionated, full of issues, constant religious battles, and always changing. Except… one thing never changed, and that was how fun it was. Every new language, paradigm, problem space, concept, pattern, and technique always brought something new.
Outside of dev: I miss watching 7 minute videos on YouTube by someone who was just really passionate about something in specific and wanted to make a name for themselves or share something. There was something really raw, human, and fun. It was very connecting to me.
Every time I consume any sort of media, the thought persists in the back of my mind, maybe unconsciously, “is this AI?”
And then I see it, some tell, or artifact-ing, just something. And to me, it becomes vomit stained. It’s generally very obvious with more visual media, because it just typically looks like ass.
With programs, this is much harder, until you read the code that is. There are many tells! Code written by AI tends to lose the plot, generates 10-line-long comments, over-abstracts, and does not carry much intention. Humans have many habits when writing code. Spacing, naming (in context), file separation, comment density, attempts to reducing cognitive load, reasoning over tests, etc.
It’s not an exact science, and that’s the fucking point.
It should be obvious by now that I’m not a writer. I would actually say that my written skills are somewhat poor. But I’m human. If I keep doing this, then I could improve even. You can’t if you use AI. In fact, you’ll just get worse.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.