whilst it is adding some productivity

Is it though? Like what’s the evidence of that? If it just feels like it must be true, I have some bad news about that:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/

The most interesting part of this isn’t that it slowed them down when they expected to be faster, it’s that even after it slowed them down, they couldn’t tell and were fooled that they had been faster.

Look at the graph, especially the last two lines:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/aicodingchart-1024x507.png

My theory about this is that LLMs were tasked with giving useful output, but they couldn’t do that, because they have no fidelity, so instead they found a shortcut, which was to trick people into thinking they were being useful. They found the same loophole that conmen have used for millenia, and automated it. It’s the AI alignment problem, only for some reason people aren’t talking about it, maybe because they don’t want to believe that we’re this easily manipulated.

There’s no reason to believe LLMs have gotten any better at actually doing useful work in the meantime in the absence of any objective measure of it. I think the best explanation for their “improvement” is that they have simply gotten better at fooling us.

Somewhere along the way our neoliberal overlords figured out that they needed to teach people to hate annoyance more than evil, and it’s been crazy effective.

Wow, I guess it can finally replicate a five-minute photoshop job.

You can tell it’s not ai because none of the gauntlet is made of pepperoni and none of the pepperoni has gauntlet decorations, among many other details.

I appreciate a good ol’ honest photoshopping.

That hole already serves the function of pushing out squishy things though.

Of all the desk jobs, programmers are least likely to be doing bullshit jobs that it doesn’t matter if it’s done by a glorified random number generator.

Like I never heard a programmer bemoan that they do all this work and it just vanishes into a void where nobody interacts with it.

The main complaint is that if they make one tiny mistake suddenly everybody is angry and it’s your fault.

Some managers are going to have some rude awakenings.