> I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before

With respect, this is what makes me worry.

If someone is a user of AI, can they really tell the difference between "outsourcing" and "using"? I worry that a lot of people will start out well-intentioned and end up completely outsourced before they realise it.

The research on AI is showing again and again that people that use AI are losing their skills not just in the specific task but more generally. This isn't a "change of skills" it's a fundamental reduction in the skills of knowledge workers.

From the linked post:[0]

> I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March, in my professional capacity I no longer write code myself. My current situation was unimaginable to me only a year ago. Like it or not, this is the future of software engineering. Turns out I like it, and having tasted the future I don’t want to go back to the old ways.

It's deeply distressing to watch people fall into AI psychosis. Being smart, accomplished, or experienced is no defence.

After the bubble pops and the industry realises the damage these tools can do to people, folks like the author will have to confront that they were taken in by a lie. Many won't be able to confront that.

[0]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/29/

This is one of those takes that is so close to understanding the problem, and then drawing an insane conclusion.

The problem is that AI agents and the code they output is untrustworthy, buggy, insecure, and lacking in any of the standards the industry has developed over the last 30 years. The solution to this is "don't use AI agents", not "change the rest of the stack to accommodate garbage".

You need to take a step back and look at the economic reality of the majority of Americans today. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, even those with "middle class" incomes. For many a $200 one-off bill is debilitating, yet alone a recurring subscription. If you don't know that, you have a dangerously narrow view of the economy.

This is the median income. If it's a struggle for someone on this income then it's worse for half of all Americans, and American incomes are higher than most of the rest of the world.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_...

I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly.

If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.

Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.

The cost to make a competitor to Anthropic or OpenAI is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars upfront. There will be few competitors and minimal market pressure to reduce prices, even if the unit costs of inference are low.

$200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.

I don't know what definition of "elite" you're using but, "technology limited so that only a small percentage of the population can afford it" is... an elite group.

This is fun and all, but I think we've reached the end of the productive discussion to be had and I don't have much more to say. Charitably, we're leaving in completely different realities. I just hope when the bubble pops the fall isn't too hard for you.

Your definition only supports my point. The transfer of skill from something you learn to something you pay to do is the exact and complete opposite of your stated definition. It turns the activity from something that requires you to learn it to one that only those that can afford to pay can do.

It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.

> Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW.

What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless. There's plenty of investors who stand to make a lot of money if these big companies exit, but there's no guarantee that will happen.

The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock. Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.

1. As I said before, we've long since reached diminishing returns on models. We simply don't have enough compute or training data left to make them dramatically better.

2. This is only true if it actually pans out, which is still an unknown question.

3. Just... not using it? It has to justify its existence. If it's not of benefit vs. the cost then why bother.

4. The public hates AI. The proliferation of "AI slop" makes people despise the technology wholesale.

What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run.

Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with little more than a shitty laptop, the time and effort, and an internet connection. How is a world where that ability is rented out to only those that can pay "democratic"?

> When the printing press was invented, scribes complained that it would lead to a flood of poorly written, untrustworthy information. And you know what? It did. And nobody cares.

A bad book is just a bad book. If a novel is $10 at the airport and it's complete garbage then I'm out $10 and a couple of hours. As you say, who cares. A bad vibe coded app and you've leaked your email inbox and bank account and you're out way more than $10. The risk profile from AI is way higher.

Same is even more true for businesses. The cost of a cyberattack or a outage is measured in the millions of dollars. It's a simple maths, the cost of the risk of compromise far oughtweights the cost of cheaper upfront software.

> You cut out the part where I said it only popped economically, but the technology continued to improve.

The improvement in AI models requires billions of dollars a year in hardware, infrastructure, end energy. Do you think that investors will continue to pour that level of investment into improving AI models for a payout that might only come ten to fifteen years down the road? Once the economic bubble pops, the models we have are the end of the road.

Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps like that is what keeps the tech industry afloat.

> Humanity is not going to stop pouring more and more money into AI.

There's no more money to pour into it. Even if you did, we're out of GPU capacity and we're running low on the power and infrastructure to run these giant data centres, and it takes decades to bring new fabs or power plants online. It is physically impossible to continue this level of growth in AI investment. Every company that's invested into AI has done so on the promise of increased improvement, but the moment that stops being true everything shifts.

> The AI bubble isn't going to pop. This is like saying the internet bubble is going to pop in 1999.

The internet bubble did pop. What happened after is an assessment of how much the tech is actually worth, and the future we have now 26 years later bears little resemblance to the hype in 1999. What makes you think this will be different?

Once the hype fades, the long-term unsuitability for large projects becomes obvious, and token costs increase by ten or one hundred times, are businesses really going to pay thousands of dollars a month on agent subscriptions to vibe code little apps here and there?

It's the opposite, code quality is becoming more and more relevant. Before now you could only neglect quality for so long before the time to implement any change became so long as to completely stall out a project.

That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost.

> We are in the very earliest months of AI actually being somewhat competent at this. It's unlikely that it will plateau and stop improving.

We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it.

> It's only trending in one direction. And it isn't going to stop.

Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns.

Think about it this way: If your job survived the popularity of offshoring to engineers paid 10% of your salary, why would AI tooling kill it?

Why not? Once the true cost of token generation is passed on to the end user and costs go up by 10 or 100 times, and once the honeymoon delusion of "oh wow I can just prompt the AI to write code" fades, there's a big question as to if what's left is worth it. If it isn't, agents will most certainly go away and all of this will be consigned to the "failed hype" bin along with cryptocurrency and "metaverse".

Companies buy these contracts for support and to have a throat to choke if things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much you pay your AI vendor, if you use their product to "vibe code" a SaaS replacement and it fails in some way and you lose a bunch of money/time/customers/reputation/whatever, then that's on you.

This is as much a political consideration as a financial one. If you're a C-suite and you let your staff make something (LLM generated or not) and it gets compromised then you're the one who signed off on the risky project and it's your ass on the line. If you buy a big established SaaS, do your compliance due-diligence (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.), and they get compromised then you were just following best practice. Coding agents don't change this.

The truth is that the people making the choice about what to buy or build are usually not the people using the end result. If someone down the food chain had to spend a bunch of time with "brittle hacks" to make their workflow work, they're not going to care at all. All they want is the minimum possible to meet whatever the requirement is, that isn't going to come back to bite them later.

SaaS isn't about software, it's about shifting blame.

All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.

From that perspective, yes some management view SWE as replaceable. My argument is that all attempts to actually implement that have failed to date, and the most successful financial companies are staffed by upper management who know that to remove much of the SWE staff would doom the company in the medium term.

It's a move of either desperation ("we'll go bankrupt if we don't do this"), or short-sightedness ("if I cut 40% of headcount, our P&L will be better, which will result in better quarterly results, which is likely to increase share price, which gives me a bigger performance bonus. Who cares what happens after that."), or a lack of experience in managing software companies and watching this play out before.

AI, even if it lives up the hype, is no different.