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this is the really ineffective head-in-the-sand reaction a lot of folks on Bluesky tend to have if you talk about any harm reduction-based approach to the reality that millions of people are using AI tools today. The current approach to critiquing AI is obviously not working, but they don't care.

How many of those tools are going to survive the bubble popping? I mean lots of people ordered crap from Webvan, too.

It'll be much the way the dotcom bubble popped in my opinion financially devastating yet absolutely ubiquitous and unavoidable

That’s my fear; it will permanently enshittify things for the benefit of a handful of jerks rather than just go away. Although I have yet to see LLMs actually work; they don’t increase productivity or produce valuable products, like, at all, and they are very expensive.

Yeah, but does it really? My understanding is that research has demonstrated it actually takes more time to use AI tools and fix its mistakes than to just have a programmer do it. arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

The fact that devs on average _greatly_ over estimated the productivity effect, even after adjusting downward after actually completing the tasks, says quite a lot about the divided discourse on LLMs within the dev community

wholesale code generation is one thing dumping a couple thousand lines of YAML configs to ask "why is my CI/CD pipeline looping?" and getting a correct answer with a one-line fix in 30 seconds is another that was on Friday btw - I hadn't had time to look at the issue so I just barfed it at Claude

I use it constantly. It absolutely lets me get a ton more done and with less stress. Maybe everyone else is using it wrong but. AI absolutely improves programmer productivity.