Hey you. Yes, you. Hold on a minute. Take a deep breath. I have something to tell you.

I am a software engineer currently fighting the great and completely uncalled for battle for sanity in the mass hysteria that took over my environment.

I have been watching people around me, many of whom I respect and used to look up to, progressively descend into madness, and I am starting to descend with them.

The irony of the fact that I obsess over how obsessed other people are with something does not escape me. I have done my best to ignore it for a long time, but this parasitic worm has finally found a way to invade my personal space and crawl into my brain, and I need to get it out.

Join me if you dare.

What is this object that has landed in my backyard

If you work in the tech industry, or any industry for that matter, you have probably noticed that things have been a little strange lately, to put it very mildly.

It is as if a meteor had crashed down to Earth from some strange galaxy, and released spores that made everyone obsessed with it. And everyone dropped whatever they were doing and discarded all that they have learned in life, to go and worship this piece of rock from outer space.

Many people developed a religious attachment to the rock, forming sects dedicated to its devoted worship. Life savings across the planet have been invested into the rock. People who could not afford to invest in the rock, took out bank loans to invest in it anyway.

All of the media surround the rock at all times, pointing all of their cameras at it non stop. Every day, they hold panels where the bright minds of the rock revolution discuss how incredible and mysterious the rock is, and debate about how much of our society should be reorganized around its appearance.

All companies on the planet that used to provide services or produce things, are now pivoting to being rock companies instead. Those that aren't yet brave enough to fully pivot, sell the same product they used to sell, with a little piece of rock attached to it which they lease from the big rock. This immediately makes their offering significantly more valuable to the stock market, and the rock is once again praised for its magic powers of multiplying money by the sheer force of faith.

It has now been more than 3 years that we have been doing this. It's embarrassing. If you are reading this in the future -- yes, your history iPad is not lying to you. We really did it.

The NFTs thing too. I'm so sorry. In our defence, we have big problems that we don't know how to address, and we need these ridiculous distractions to avoid facing the existential dread that is eating us from the inside. I hope you guys are doing better than we are.

The rock

I think that at the bottom of a lot of this there is a fundamental misunderstanding, purposefully perpetuated by a certain group of industries.

When I speak to people who are excited about AI, they talk to me about chess engines, DNA sequencing algorithms, and various other things that have nothing to do with Large Language Models, which are the actual object of this mania.

Many people seem to believe that on the back end, the companies absorbing trillions of dollars from the economy are working on all of the awesome, groundbreaking things, and LLMs are only a small demo of what is to come.

My friend, they are not. This is it. What you see right now, that is what they are working on. And even this alone is completely untenable for them to sustain without endlessly burning countless billions of dollars, which is why we're still even talking about this.

Not only is this not going to make your dreams come true, it is actively taking away all investment capital that could otherwise have been used on whatever innovation you are conflating this with. Unless your big dream really is a Large Language Model.

Is it though?

Look, I know that it is very impressive that computer can talk. Okay? I get it. Very cool. Calm down.

Take a deep breath, unplug from the hive mind for a second, and think if that by itself really is such a civilization ending event.

Does the fact that the computer made words, automatically make the words important? Did it say something profound? Is it really that intelligent, or are you lowering your intellectual standards to accommodate for it, because you really want it to be something that it is not?

Large Language Models are next token predictors. They predict the next most likely token based on the training data that was put into their database. They do not think, they do not reason, they are not autonomous. They are a computer program that uses probability to stitch together words and create an illusion of communicating thought. What they put out is statistically probable, which entirely different from true, or from what human thought is.

This program is deliberately designed to present this statistical approximation of training data as if it was the truth of reality, which is how many people vastly overestimate its "intelligence", or worse yet outright consider it to be the Oracle.

If you are one of those people, I would like to make it very clear to you that you are wrong. This is a trick. You are being manipulated and mislead. There is no conscious, all-knowing entity that was "born" out of the computer. This is a consumer product engineered for engagement.

The LLM is a computer program. It is subject to the same limitations as other computer programs. If you really insist, you can theorize that they are going to make it more accurate, or more efficient, or that it will have a better interface. It will not crawl out of the screen and chase you around like the girl from The Ring. I can promise you that.

Yet, we continue to spiral into this baseless hypothesis that LLMs will magically develop divine qualities, if we just continue throwing money into the gas turbine to train them for long enough.

Hey guys, remember Web 3.0?

I remember. Back when Blockchain was the biggest thing ever, I worked in tech, but I was not yet a developer. I remember the incredible mystique that this word had, and people were just as nuts about it as they are now about AI.

The Blockchain was going to democratize the financial system, give power to the people, and help in cancer research (yes, I kid you not).

As far as I can tell, cancer research has not advanced because of the Blockchain. The other two I will let you decide for yourself.

Information era mania is always about some vague, barely describable entity with a grandiose sounding name. It is so because this kind of a mythical entity is a potent vehicle for human imagination. The public can project whatever hopes and dreams they have about technology onto it, and they are encouraged to do so by the people who stand to make a profit from the resulting stock market up and down.

At that point, the mania is not about the thing. There are, at that point, as many Blockchains or AIs as there are people thinking about it.

If we don't learn to recognize this pattern, we will be forced to repeat it forever, or at least for as long as the structures of society are able sustain our collective psychoses, which might not be very long at this rate.

Today, I understand that Blockchain is a very slow distributed database that has a limited number of niche use cases. We have many other kinds of much more performant and more diverse-purpose databases, and we have had them for many decades.

Interestingly, none of them have triggered an entire economy to go into an uncontrollable spasm. I guess PostgreSQL just doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way, even though it quietly supports the entire digital infrastructure that you rely on every day. You can download it for free and run it on almost any computer in existence. It will handle workloads for you like you wouldn't believe on a stupid Raspberry PI.

But back then, it was the Blockchain. Wow. The hugest thing ever, that was going to completely transform the world beyond recognition.

If you had been too preoccupied with the second industrial revolution lately (I gagged writing this), you might have missed the sparse reporting on the spectacular success of the most recent previous revolution.

Guys, everything was going to change after the Metaverse. You were going to have all of your business meetings in the Metaverse. All of your shopping was going to be in the Metaverse. The world was finally going to become the global village, where most social interactions take place in VR.

When Meta (renamed so because the Metaverse was the future of everything) added legs to avatars in the Metaverse, many Twitter people lost their shit instead. We were already dividing the history of human civilization into "before Metaverse", and "after Metaverse".

I challenge you to read this article. All of it. This was less than 4 years ago. Less than 4 years ago this was considered normal.

I'm skipping the part about NTFs. I don't even want to think about that.

The chatbot is not your friend

With all the yapping about efficiency, and productivity, and whatever else not, we have lost sight of what I think is the most important question to ask here.

What kind of effect does this have on you? On your brain? Your mind?

If you think that it has none, then you are wrong. If you think that it has a positive one, then you are more wrong.

The chatbot is an application designed and optimized for engagement. It is a trick from the social media playbook, where it has done a great job making some rich while destroying the lives of millions of others.

The design decisions of its interface, including the system prompt, are deliberately crafted to reflect this goal. When the chatbot tells you how smart and beautiful you are 100 times a day, you might think that you are talking to an otherworldly entity that has finally noticed you.

No, my friend. You are talking to some sweaty Silicon Valley nerd that was instructed to manufacture this experience for you by an army of product managers, who spent an ungodly number of man hours having meetings and crunching numbers to understand what is going to glue you to the screen for the longest. Whatever is making you gravitate towards the sycophancy is human and common. That is why they exploit it at scale.

The design goal of the chatbot is not to help you. It is not to make you more productive. It is not to make you a fortune. It is to keep you using the chatbot.

About vibe coding and similar activities

I am going to say something that is going to feel upsetting to many of my fellow developers. If they're still reading after all the upsetting things I have said already.

What you are doing, if you are one of the hopelessly engaged types, is not about efficiency, or the job, or even the code. Here is what this is about:

Your brain has become accustomed to a certain amount of dopamine. That same amount of dopamine or more now has to be regularly supplied to the brain to avoid withdrawal.

That is what this is. It is an addiction like all other addictions. Somebody sold you funny crystals of unknown origin and told you that they are medicine. In fact, they gave them to you for free, and anytime you want, there is more. Not only is there no stigma associated with using -- you are also encouraged to do so, and applauded for doing it.

You might be thinking that if everybody else is also doing it, then there cannot possibly be anything wrong with it. The business and the media are captured to such an extent, that they get to freely spread a narrative that the crystals are in fact good for you. I disagree.

I think that this is bad for you. Really bad. Some of you sound like you're a week away from developing scabs on your skin. You know that manic laugh from the AI hedge fund vampire guy? He's not the only one who does it. Try talking about AI in front of a mirror and see if you don't scare yourself.

There is no universe in which constantly talking to your computer as if it is your friend, agent, slave, or whatever flavour of emotional attachment you have developed with it could possibly be healthy for you. Watching millions of lines of code fly in front of your face every damn day of the week can not possibly be good for you.

Look, I like me some quick dopamine just as much as the next guy. We are very vulnerable to this stuff, which is why it is so successful. You are hardly the first person to fall into this trap. This happens to people all the time.

It feels great in the moment. It presses the same buttons in the brain as being productive does. It is easy to convince yourself that you are moving mountains.

Are you, really? Or do you just have to keep digging deeper now, because you're afraid of what would happen if you stop?

These are of course just my opinions, but you could verify them. Just try to go without it for a few days. Maybe a week? If you do not suffer at all -- good for you. You can ignore me.

If you try to code without it and realize that you don't know what to do anymore, that would be an uh-oh moment for me, personally. You can also just ignore me either way.

I don't care. This is my moment to be famous on X the everything app

If you really want to go down the path of unlimited indulgence, fine. Many people do that. You can be a mad scientist creating heaps of digital garbage nobody asked for. I am not your father. Do what you want.

Just call it what it is. Stop blowing smoke up everybody's ass that this is about efficiency. Your public attempts to rationalize your addiction are a bad influence on people, many of them young and impressionable (or old and impressionable apparently that's also a thing).

If you are in a position of authority, because for example you are a senior engineer, young people who want to enter the industry will listen to you when you constantly tell them that frying their brains is the only way not to get "left behind".

You are also putting pressure on others to use, because you are normalizing this behaviour to the people who pay out salaries, and who start to expect the same volume of output from others. Notice how I said volume and not quality, because that is the only thing they are able to assess.

They will also expect this volume or more from you from now on. Are you trying to play hunger games with your colleagues? Why? Try to get sick or burned out in this kind of environment. They will eat you like chum.

But I thought AI was good at coding :thinking-face:

I would like to clarify one thing here. When I read reports, even from the AI-sceptical side, I often see a misconception that all AI output is trash except for computer code. That is not true.

The computer code is also trash. Whatever you think of AI writing or "art", the code is the same if not worse. Productivity is not increasing, the standards of what is acceptable to run in production are being lowered to accommodate for LLMs, because supposedly AI is the future and we must use it or be left behind.

People who are not educated in the matter understandably have to rely on the opinion of "experts" to understand what's going on. The problem is that the experts are having glue sniffing competitions at the office every day, and doing their best to project an image outwards that they "do not have a problem". These are the bright and vocal stars of software engineering right now.

The supposed genius of AI at coding is often used to explain away the lackluster development of the technology that was supposed to improve exponentially every month. Maybe the chatbot is not getting much better, but have you heard about autonomous loop agentic software factory vibe orchestration harness engineering? It's so powerful and advanced, you wouldn't get it. The red spots on my neck? I just got sunburnt, it's nothing.

Engineers who used to spend time caring for the quality of what they deliver are now also being forced to put out streams of garbage to conform to this deteriorating standard, because apparently in 2026 society 'more == better'.

Imagine if we applied this to other engineering work. Imagine that we took on the attitude that building more bridges is always better.

Just build more bridges. Does not matter the quality. Does not matter if the engineers who signed off on the bridge understand how it is built.

Skip the planning, the measurements, or the part where we assess if the ground that we are building on can support the weight of the bridge. Skip the part where we assess if anyone needs the bridge in the first place. Just go straight to the bridge being there, because bridge is always better than no bridge.

The magic black box machine made something that looks like a bridge, and we are happy to let people drive cars on it. Awesome.

This is what our industry is becoming.

But the industry...

Dude, we are the industry. This whole thing where we just throw our hands up in the air and proclaim that there is absolutely nothing that we can do, because the powers that be have already made the decisions, is just lazy. You are not a weightless speck of dust pointlessly floating around the universe. Are you?

We used to have agency in this world. That is because at the end of the day, the suit and tie wearing folk need us more than we need them. Which is also why some of them are desperately trying to remove that agency by making us incompetent and helplessly dependent on the dopamine dispenser.

Many of us abandoned that agency without any fight whatsoever, because the easy dopamine tingles the brain in a place where it's just too hard to resist it. Oh, how are you going to miss it when it is gone, my friend.

To be fair, there is also a major element of fear at play. The doom propaganda really did the work in this industry. People who have a lot to lose are easily scared by the threat of it being taken away from them, even if that threat is manufactured. It has gotten so bad that some software engineers believe that if they do not conform now, the LLM will one day fly out of the computer and eat their soul like a Dementor. Truly, dark days for our profession.

Many assume up front that their boundaries would not be respected by the business, even though they never tried setting them. They will say yes to everything that the managers tell them to do, and then complain that the managers are stupid.

Brother, do something. Why not try to influence the business to make better decisions? It is in their own interest to listen to you. They can do nothing except with your hands. If they knew what you know then they would not employ you.

I understand that there are fringe examples where people are ruled by complete lunatics, but I refuse to believe that that is the norm.

I am not saying that you should grab a pitchfork or go on a hunger strike. Obviously, there are smart and not smart ways to go about this. There has to be a middle way between completely giving up and doing the pitchfork thing.

We could try to explain to people who do not know why 'more bridges != better'. You could try to explain to your boss why sustained bad code practices will have bad long term outcomes for their business.

There are probably other positive things that we could do. Help me out here and share with others if you think of something. And for Christ Almighty up in the Heavens, don't ask ask Claude about it. Think.

Nobody is going to fire you over that, unless you actually work at the evil empire. At which point, maybe consider finding another job. Is the money really worth it?

I am talking about programming here, because I am a programmer. I imagine that much of this applies to many other professions.

Tech is most of our problems and more tech is not the answer

There is constant talk about this or that technology being transformative. I think that many people really want it to be transformative, because most of us instinctively feel that something is wrong. Something is wrong with our society, and something is missing from our lives. I agree with that.

There are many things that are wrong. We have reached a grotesque scale of economic inequality and concentration of wealth. Our natural environment is being destroyed. People are lonely. Young people don't have adequate guidance in life. People can't afford to live. People are victims of literal war.

That's just a sample. Shake this ball of misery and many other problems that need attention will fall out. We need to look for solutions to those problems. Urgently.

But Ladies and Gentlemen, this is doing the opposite.

Many of those problems come from our rapidly progressing addiction to technology. It would be an act of wisdom to finally acknowledge this fact and stop pouring gasoline on the fire.

Technology is not a virtue in of itself. Not all technology is worth the costs it incurs. We need less technology in our lives, not more. We have already gone too far. There is no rational reason to keep digging deeper. At the very least, we could use a better selection of what technology we invest in developing and why.

I would like to propose a thought experiment

What if we took just half of the money that AI-adjacent companies will allegedly spend on data centers full of power-hungry, water-depleting GPUs just this year ("give or take" $392.5B), and instead spent that money on, for example, building renewable energy infrastructure. Could this perhaps have a better outcome for society?

Here is an even crazier one:

What if we took the other half and spent it on, say, feeding the people who are starving? What do you think?

In a world where hundreds of millions of people literally don't have food to eat, the big problem that has finally made us galvanize all available resources is that programmers have to write code and managers have to read emails. Think about that for a second. This is fucking insane.

If you were about to make the "argument" that when we have AGI, it will tell us how to end hunger and solve climate change, stop right now.

Close your laptop. Go outside. Let a few rays of sunshine come in contact with your skin. Talk to a real person. Then come back, because I have a few more words for you.

Boss. We already know what to do. We just can't do it, because the people hoarding the resources are making us do this shit instead.

People had done the research. All that the LLM can do is find that research and present it to you as its own creation, and you can't help but marvel at how smart and powerful it is.

And AGI cannot do anything at all, because it is not real. You don't need it either. You could find the information yourself if you bothered to look.

The AGI trope is a lazy escape from doing the actual work of searching for solutions to problems. Which explains why people who do not want to solve any real problems, run to it every single time they have to answer a difficult question. Is that you?

If you are helping spread this narrative, then you are unwittingly hurting yourself and others for the benefit of a few people who you do not even know, and who will collect the exit liquidity and call you a dumb fuck at the end of the cycle. You are fighting a fight against your kin on behalf of someone who has you for less than the dust under their feet. Maybe don't?

You have a choice

If you really want the life that the tech industry is offering you right now, then you are free to follow them. It's your life. I can't tell you what to do. Just know that there are counter arguments and make an informed decision.

The industry and mass media are trying to wear you down. The propaganda campaign that has been relentlessly waged against you is made to overwhelm you and make you feel like you don't have a choice, but that is not true.

You have agency. You can make your own choices. Nobody has the right to demand of you that work towards your own demise.

You are under no obligation to participate in whatever group think is happening on social media this week. It's fully possible to disregard it and do something else.

Not making any choice and letting the herd dictate where you go, is also a choice. Doing what the rest of the group does out of fear of being excluded -- that's a choice as well. Not pushing back when your employer is making you do something that you know is wrong -- another choice.

You have to pick something. Do it consciously and with your own interest at heart, or someone who does not care about your interest at all will do it for you.

Even if you believe that this "is here to stay", how much are you willing to sacrifice for it? Do you want to pay the cost that it incurs on you?

Your path is your own.

If you do want my opinion though

This is a trick. I understand that it is a convincing one, but it is a trick nonetheless. Its fun, quirky magic had ran out a long time ago. Eventually, we will have to wrap this party up, go home, have the hangover, and move on.

Hanging around past 2AM and killing beer bongs after the neighbours have already threatened to call the cops might not be the best course of action, if you ask me.

Many people fell for this real hard, and it is difficult for them to accept that they have been duped. They bet their reputations, savings, some of them their professions on this working out. That's a pretty bad position to be in, because it is not working out.

I feel bad for some of these people, even though they have been extremely obnoxious and annoying for the past 3 years. I think that stopping right now and turning back before the crash is still the best way to minimize the damage.

Some, especially on the higher rungs, are so deep into this toxic swamp that they will have to double, triple, and quadruple down until the laws of gravity finally stop them.

You don't have to follow them. If you work for a lunatic that forces you to use, and there really is nothing that you can do about it (first, examine if that's really the case), then you have to do what you have do to make a living. Do what they require and wait it out.

Cut back on your personal use, with the goal of completely stopping it. Anything the LLM can do, you can do better and grow in the process. Will it take effort? Yes. Will it take time? It will. Will you have to think and prioritize what is worth doing and what is not? Absolutely. All of those things are good for you.

Cultivate a reading habit of some sort to keep yourself tethered to reality. Don't read slop from TikTok. There is a literal plethora of wisdom and literature that countless generations that came before us have left for us. Use it.

Regardless of how this unravels, I do agree that there will be a different world after it. What that world will look like for each of us will depend on the choices that we make.

I would just invite you to consider the following:

If everyone around you is speeding down the edge of the cliff, is it not better to stay "behind" and find another way?