Rant about AI
Valeria

Valeria @valeriavg

About: Re-inventor extraordinaire, optimisation addict and open web advocate.

Location:
Stockholm, Sweden
Joined:
Sep 23, 2020

Rant about AI

Publish Date: Feb 28
53 18

Cover image for this post is generated by Mistral AI / Le Chat. It’s an awesome image: it depicts two cute kittens wearing cute clothes with their cute little faces.

AI has gone a long way since its first awkward attempts to depict hands and fingers in the proper amount. Images are now almost perfect! They use someone else’s style and ideas with no explicit permission, but they’re very good.

AI can help and refine an article or an email. Whenever I want my text to sounds professional (or soulless) - I use AI. It’s great at spotting typos and spitting out a text with no personality.

AI is a great listener! It’ll reflect your thoughts back onto you and share a generic advice (that you should always double check). I’m pretty sure AI agents can replace Google search bar. You place your problem there and hope someone else ran into that before: be it “How to patch KDE for FreeBSD” or “Why didn’t she call me back”.

If you’re lucky you’ll find an answer eventually!

AI can sometimes guess what I’m going to type. In most cases it’ll annoy the hell out of me with its suggestions, but sometimes it might guess right. I still rely on autocomplete more than on Copilot. But it helps greatly when I need to generate test cases! It’s great at coming up with domain specific lorem ipsums! Not the images url though, unfortunately - those are usually returning 404.

With that said I’m so tired of hearing how we’re on the verge of general AI. I’m grateful to Deepseek for shaking the industry and making AI cheaper, but let’s stop pretending that we believe the lies told to investors.

I tried Lovable and it’s a fun toy to play with, but it can’t really replace neither developer, nor designer: it is great at creating small crude prototypes for inspiration. The tool itself is of a great quality: apart from AI hiccups I didn’t run into any issues. Works amazingly well, doesn’t do what it promises though.

But hey, I wanted to believe! Just like millions of other people I bought the lie that I can make my life easier and offload boring, repetitive or time consuming tasks onto AI.

How could I not? I have barely 30 minutes a day to work on my side project (Hounty still has an heartbeat, but it’s not yet out of the woods) and AI promised production ready solutions in minutes!

In retrospect we are still struggling to educate humans: beautiful machines that shouldn’t, but can be powered by leftovers. Very cost efficient and capable!

Empathetic, loving, caring, curious, goofy and diverse we are forced to be like everyone else with the goal of achieving general intelligence as well I would assume.

We study, we learn various crafts so that we could ensure a good enough life for ourselves and our families. Some of us are forced into insane debts for said education, some are more lucky and invest only tremendous amount of time. All to be able to make the ends meet eventually.

Software engineering used to guarantee that but now AI evangelists are screaming left and right that developers are being replaced by AI and thus creating even more uncertainty and anxiety for those who had hoped that they found an ethical and legal way of having a good life by typing code on their computers.

I can’t seem to replace my amazing team with AI: there’s no AI yet that would go to a meeting, gather requirements, calm stakeholders down and come back to building a new feature or debugging and I’m working in an industry where tech is a backbone, but not the whole business.

There’s no AI that would attend user interviews and find flaws in the design or come up with experiments that could test out a hypothesis before they go and make a design in Figma.

There’s no AI that would architect a sustainable solution, heck it struggles to organise files in a folder properly.

And those companies letting go of people just to force those remaining to work more to sustain their AI bluff should be ashamed.

But then again, how can we talk about artificial general intelligence if we’re still stuck in mindless wars and petty political squabbles? If we would be smart enough to come up with AGI (fuelled by quantum computing perhaps), we’d be way over caveman mentality, wouldn’t we be?

And if we ever want to get there - to a place where tech makes our lives easier and more enjoyable - we absolutely cannot give up on supporting new generation of developers and scientists. They are the ones who can do this, not us. The best we can do is to lay out the foundation. Honest, transparent foundation of the future tech: fake it till we make it doesn’t really work in this case.

This post has NOT been reviewed or edited by an AI

Comments 18 total

  • Andrey Rusev
    Andrey RusevFeb 28, 2025

    This post has NOT been reviewed or edited by an AI

    ... which is why it's a nice post! :)

    Anyway, just wanted to say that I also think AI doesn't really deliver much ... I mean - nothing even close to how it's advertised. :) I think the latter ("how it's advertised") is the typical Silicon Valley way of pumping Wall Street stock prices... But that's a different topic :)

    • Valeria
      ValeriaFeb 28, 2025

      Thank you! Exactly!
      I’m sure there’s use for AI and I hope it’ll find its niche eventually. Just so damn tired of all the baseless hype

    • hitour24
      hitour24Feb 28, 2025

      ok

  • Anmol Baranwal
    Anmol BaranwalFeb 28, 2025

    Whenever I want my text to sounds soulless .. I use AI 😂

    I've said it too many times.. ai destroys personality, people don't care if there is a little grammatical mistake in your response but they will as soon as you put the cringe ai text.

  • Assis Zang
    Assis ZangFeb 28, 2025

    Can I send this post to, like, everyone I know and those I don't know yet? 😅

    • Valeria
      ValeriaFeb 28, 2025

      Haha! Thank you 🫶

  • Cesar Aguirre
    Cesar AguirreFeb 28, 2025

    there’s no AI yet that would go to a meeting, gather requirements, calm stakeholders down and come back to building a new feature

    Exactly! If somebody else write specs and we only turn those specs into code, we're out of business sooner than later. AI will eat us alive.

    Oh those cute cats on the cover, who will resist to open your post :)

  • hitour24
    hitour24Feb 28, 2025

    super

  • hitour24
    hitour24Mar 1, 2025

    ok

  • Arron
    ArronMar 1, 2025

    Perfectly captures how a lot of people feel about AI (including me). The hype train's slowing down and AI is nowhere near good enough, or reliable enough, to do what people were thought it could a few years ago. If we do indeed reach AGI or an AI that can work as a fully autonomous engineer - it's a matter of decades away, not years, I think.

  • nadeem zia
    nadeem ziaMar 1, 2025

    Good one

  • Malik Jabbar
    Malik JabbarMar 2, 2025

    The post critiques the current state of AI, highlighting its strengths in automation and efficiency while emphasizing its limitations in creativity, problem-solving, and human interaction. It challenges the hype around AGI, calling for transparency and continued investment in human talent rather than blind reliance on AI.

    • Valeria
      ValeriaMar 2, 2025

      And this comment has been generated by AI I presume? 🤗

  • Raja Shrivastava
    Raja ShrivastavaMar 3, 2025

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  • Hannah Hailu Muthoni
    Hannah Hailu MuthoniMar 4, 2025

    I was having this exact discussion with my brother the other day (we're both devs). I had just finished working on a model that performs contract analysis, practically the same thing that the average Joe would need a lawyer for. Yet some lawyers were telling my brother how his job would be made obsolete by AI. And we couldn't help thinking that their job would be more at stake (if I could get the bugs out for crying out loud) than mine. Yet no matter how proud I was of my creation, I would still trust a lawyer to draft a contract more than I would AI. We will always need humans. In the 80s and 90s they said office jobs would be made obsolete by computers, only for computers to increase the need for office workers and I feel we're on a similar precipice with AI (though, obviously, not as close as tech bros want to make us think we are).

  • Alex Escalante
    Alex EscalanteMar 9, 2025

    Haha... I just published my own rant about a tool that creates images.

    But to be honest: I do use ChatGPT a lot in my everyday work, to learn, summarize and even clean and correct my own writing. I do have to write a lot, so it is very helpful.

    What I do is this: I decide how much of my own style I need in the text I am writing. When I am writing commercial copy, corporate or technical communication, clarity is more important that style. At least to me.

    If I am writing something more close to me, particularly in english, which is my second language, I might tell ChatGPT to "clean up" my writing, preserving my style. It works very well!

    If I write in Spanish, again, I could use it for commercial purposes. I very seldom use it for my personal writings.

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