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for the haters - bad news, i am afraid. literally every Fortune 500 company is using AI to develop their products and services. in many cases they're no longer even doing manual code review. i hate to break it to you, but if you won't use services built using AI you just checked out of modern life.

i mean I appreciate the desire to do that. Late stage capitalism fucking sucks, in many many ways. The theft of IP is gross, the environmental arguments against AI are quite reasonable. We need jobs to live. But just saying I won't ever use anything that touched AI doesn't seem realistic.

i won't be an apologist for the excesses of the AI bro revolution, but I am a pragmatist and a realist. We have to deal with the reality of the situation as it is, not just how we'd like it to be. It's my job to track software and I fucking love software developers and developer culture.

your pain and feelings shouldn't be discounted. many devs are feeling grief right now, for lost craft and agency, while others are high as kites on LLM dopamine and stock options. but yeah, I don't want to leave the tech future to the fascists, so I feel like we kind of need to engage.

Are any of the AI vendors even close to making any money though? And if the customers are charged the real cost, would it be cheaper to hire a decent programmer? Or are we past that point now? (Genuine question, as I’m too long out the industry to keep up with it all)

They are making an absolutely incredible amount of money. Like all startups they're not making a profit because they're investing loads in growth, but inference itself is wildly profitable and the labs are printing money

I rarely talk to any enterprises that aren't spending good money with anthropic these days

2026 is when we got good enough at context and harness engineering to get enough out of the november 2025 models that they can do significant things in coding and operations (and math and elsewhere); most devs who don't live on the bleeding edge are probably still working out how to incorporate that

I have spent a LOT of time asking about ROI and measuring outcomes recently and orgs are going from 'kick it around and see what it does' to 'all these PoCs were missing something' to 'show me the value' and as the engineering catches up in more orgs. I think they get more value

So your hating on AI art, music, and writing will change as they get better?

OTOH, this feels like one of the cases that @lessig.bsky.social referred to way back when as (iirc) "extremism in one side engenders extremism in the other", but... Much of the anti-AI behavior scans as people looking for a random dev they feel they can dogpile and bully online. And fuck that.