this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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"Cognitive amplifier?" Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.
I'm watching people in my industry (software development) who've bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they're producing the shittiest garbage I've laid eyes on as a developer. And students who are using it in school aren't learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them. The smart ones are avoiding it like the blight on humanity that it is.
I study mechatronics in Germany and I don't avoid it. I have yet to meet a single person who is avoiding it. I have made tremendous progress learning with it. But that is mostly the case because my professors refuse to give solutions for the seminars. Learning is probably the only real advantage that I have seen yet. If you don't use it for cheating or shorcuts, which is of course a huge problem. But getting answers to problems, getting to ask specific follow up questions and most of all researching and getting to the right information faster (through external links from AI) has made studying much more efficient and enjoyable for me.
I don't like the impact on society AI is having bur personally it has really helped me so far. (discounting the looming bubble crises and the market effect it is having on memory f.e.)
I just spent two days fixing multiple bugs introduced by some AI made changes, the person who submitted them, a senior developer, had no idea what the code was doing, he just prompted some words into Claude and submitted it without checking if it even worked, then it was "reviewed" and blindly approved by another coworker who, in his words, "if the AI made it, then it should be alright"
Show him the errors of his ways. People learn best by experience.
You're right, they SHOULD be fired.
Management loves that they are using AI, they will probably get promoted if anything.
It's being pushed very hard by management where I work and I'm consistently seeing the same as above. I mentioned on another thread recently that I've heard "I don't know why Claude did that" multiple times over the past few weeks.
It's infuriating.
Look for another work place as soon as you can. If not you will forever be in the position of being the cleaner of their shit and you will not gain anything by it. They will get their metrics going up and you will be known to be the slow guy because you care about fixing the code.
A scapegoat to shove that little responsibility (golden parachute) they get paid for so much on.
The number of times I've been debugging something and a coworker messages "I asked ChatGPT and it said [obviously wrong thing]" makes me want to gouge my eyes out
As evidence: How the fuck is a company as big as Microsoft letting their CEO keep making such embarassing public statements? How the fuck has he not been forced into more public speaking training by the board?
This is like the 4th "gaffe" of his since the start of the year!
You don't usually need "social permission" to do something good. Mentioning that is at best, publicly stating that you think you know what's best for society (and they don't). I think the more direct interpretation is that you're openly admitting you're doing the type of thing that you should have asked permission for, but didn't.
This is past the point of open desperation.
Love your name.
Wild guess here is the social one is the one where most countries has allowed them to do what it takes and special contract deals.
Likely not public socially. At least, I doubt that.
Last time they were crying that nobody wanted it and made the word bad. It's all kinda strategy to converse most amount of people you can. Like other users mentioned above the post of people in their org using gpt. I see this too in my org and by variety or engineers or regular folks and I face palm every time because you get responses that roughly makes sense but contextually are horrendously poor and misunderstood entirely.
Desperation probably because they invested so much money on something of a demand that doesn't even exit yet.
This is the one that really concerns me. It feels like generations of students are just going to learn to push the slop button for any and everything they have to do. Even if these bots were everything techbros claimed they are, this would still be devastating for society.
Well, one way or another it won't be too many generations. Either we figure out it's a bad idea or sooner or later things will go off the wheels enough that we won't maintain the infrastructure to support everyone using this type of "AI". Being kind of right 90% of the time is not good enough at a power plant.
Businesses have invested too much time, money and promises in AI to admit they made a mistake, now. And like all business models based on the Sunk Cost Fallacy, it's going to do a lot of damage along the way before it finally dies.
Even one or two seems like it'd be catastrophic. And if nothing's changed until they enter the workforce and start fucking shit up, I'd say that's something like 10 years of teens becoming dependent on it and losing out on critical education and development (presuming worst case - no market crash). That's a lot of damage.
I've been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we're all getting these messages from management that don't give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say "just put this in." We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.
It may be time for some malicious compliance.
Don't reverse engineer anything. Do as your told and "just put this in" and deploy it. Everything will break and management will explode, but now you've demonstrated that they can't just replace you with AI.
Now explain what you've been doing (reverse engineering to figure out their requirements), but that you're not going to do that anymore. They need to either give you proper requirements so that you can write properly working code, or they give you AI slop and you're just going to "put it in" without a second thought.
You'll need your whole team on board for this to work, but what are they going to do, fire the whole team and replace them with AI? You'll have already demonstrated that that's not an option.
So in your case, not only is the LLM coding assistant not making you faster, it's actively impeding your productivity and the productivity of your stakeholders. That sucks, and I'm sorry you're having to put up with it.
I'm lucky that in my day job, we're not (yet) forced to use LLMs, and the "AI coding platform" our upper management is trying to bring on as an option is turning out to be an embarrassing boondoggle that can't even pass cybersecurity review. My hope is that the VP who signed off on it ends up shit-canned because it's such a piece of garbage.
And they are all getting dependent and addicted to something that is currently almost "free" but the monetization of it all will soon come in force. Good luck having the money to keep paying for it or the capacity to handle all the advertisement it will soon start to push out. I guess the main strategy is manipulate people into getting experience with it with these 2 or 3 years basically being equivalent to a free trial and ensuring people will demand access to the tools from their employees which will pay from their pockets. When barely anyone is able to get their employers to pay for things like IDEs... Oh well.
We watched this exact same tactic happen with Xbox gamepass over the last 5 years. They introduced it and left in the capability to purchase the "upgrade" for $1/year. Now they are suddenly cranking it up to $30/month and people are still paying it because they feel like it's a service they "have to have".
Small sample but everyone i know dropped it on the increase to 30 bucks. One of them had been primarily playing PlayStation and xbox for the last decade but has gotten and primarily plays steam deck now.
Which is why I've dropped it myself. Not worth the price.
I'm usually too lazy when it comes to canceling things, but I canceled Game Pass right away. $30 per month is just offensive.
Agreed
This recent massive price hike (it fucking doubled) is what got me to cancel my live, completely.
I've been subscribed since 2002, when it first released. So their greed lost a sure stream of income. I'm not alone.
Textbook example of enshittification.
Is it $30/month on top of Xbox gold or does the game pass include it?
It's included, but good lord if that's not a very high price for temporary access to a collection of bargain bin games. You could buy a full price game every other month for that money.
or 3-6 indies on sale - hell if you save up that money you can go nuts every steam/gog same, 360$ should get you around 1k$ games retail price upwards if you are a patient gamer
Edit: and you can KEEP that, not temporary
On top of that, I have personally developed some gaming habits that I don't care for at all as a direct result of gamepass.
Subscriptions are thieves of intentionality
Gold doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s game pass core or something…the rate went up with that forced “migration”. You do get access to a few “free” games with core, but you gotta pay way more to have the full deal. I think core (which is the cheapest, baseline option) is $70/yr now? (Edit- i just checked my statement, it’s $78.50)
Hell, Microsoft and Apple did the same thing decades ago. Microsoft offered computer discounts to high schools and colleges, so that the students would be used to (and demand) Microsoft when they went into the business world. Apple then undercut that by offering very discounted products to elementary and junior high schools, so that the students would want Apple products in higher education and the business world.
The tactic let them write off all the discounts on their taxes, but lock in customers and raise prices on business (and eventually consumer) goods.
Yes. Then I come on Lemmy and see a dedicated pack of heralds constantly professing that they do the work of 10 devs while eating bon bons and everyone that isn't using it is stupid. So annoying
God, that's so frustrating. I want to shake them and shout, "No, your code is 100% ass now, but you don't know it because it passes tests that were written by the same LLM that wrote your code! And you have barely laid eyes on it, so you're forgetting what good code even looks like!"
I decided not to finish my college program partially because of AI like chatgpt. My last 2 semesters would have been during the pandemic with an 8 month work term before. Covid ended up canceling the work term and would give me the credit anyway. The rest of the classes would all be online and mostly multiple choice quizs. There wasn't a lot of AI scanning tech for academic submissions yet either. I felt if i continued, I'd be getting a worse product for the same price (online vs in class/lab), wont get that valuble work experience, and id be at a disadvantage if i didnt use AI in my work.
Luckily my program had a 2 year of 3 year option. The first 2 years of the 3 year is the same so i just took the 2 year cert and got out.
Wym you would be at a disadvantage? College isn't a competition. By not using AI in the learning process and submissions you might get a lower grade than others, but trust me no one fucking checks your college grades. They check if you know what you are doing.
In fact you wouldn't get a lower grade, others would have an inflated grade which then won't translate to skills and will have issues in the workforce.
It didn't sit right with me. I made the deans list each semester before that for good grades. I wanted no speculation that my grades were influenced by AI in the next semester. In a competitive job market, making the deans list consistently could absolutely stand out among other candidates. It shows respect for deadlines and the education.
This has to be a bot - no student in the history of the universe has ever said this, ever
Not a bot. Both my internship interviews commented on me making the deans list.
Was AI really that big of a thing at the time of Covid?
It was just starting out around that time, hence why it wasn't much of a concern in my earlier semesters. Plus they had better in class controls for cheating like monitoring computers and in person exams instead of online. You would have got an instant fail if you got caught using AI or plagarism on your projects.