To me, that’s not only not a credible stance, it’s immensely stupid.

The only way anyone could logically take that stance in the face of all the evidence otherwise is if their entire livelihood depended on it.

Oh… wait.

that or "Angry but doesn't know much"

He used to be really thoughtful and funny about the topics he took on. And I realize that's pretty standard for a critic. But now he just keeps digging deeper and deeper, getting more things wrong post after post. His posts have grown to probably 3x the frequency and 3x the length of when he was talking about stuff like Google tanking their Search business by bringing in the Ad guys.

He really used to be a "little extreme" with some really grounded viewpoints. Now it's more like he's performing the "angry british guy" in order to maintain his impression count and audience.

It reminds me a LOT of that Eli Schiff guy in the design world. A mediocre designer who couldn't get untangled from one specific design style, who figured out that anger drives clicks. Schiff became a "design critic" who eventually fell down the alt-right pathway and ended up becoming a pariah. I'm not saying Zitron is gonna turn into some right wing nutjob, but he's falling down the nutjob path right now in real time by consistently staking out the worst ungrounded takes and continually doubling down on them.

A mistake was made. There are well worn paths for fixing the mistake. Acting like a giant fucking petulant pissbaby is not the critical path to getting things fixed and is deeply corrosive to the positive collaborative environment we’ve all spent decades building within shared, community software.

Get the fuck over yourself.

Let's engage in some parallelism then

This happens with literally everything in our society. Right now, every single food product seems to be infused with protein. In the past, they've had GMOs removed, MSG removed, been Fiber-infused... the list goes on and on.

We don't see people bullying and threatening grocery store clerks and managers over clear hype-cycle bullshit. Why? Because every rational person knows this is pure nonsense.

This behavior is NOT sane.

As many others have pointed out, this is just a regression that occurred during regular software development. There's nothing remarkable here that makes it AI-specific, other than that the contributions were AI-assisted. Regressions in software happen. You roll back to a stable version and make a bug report. You don't shit your diaper and sling it at the maintainer.

Acting like a giant fucking douche is NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR.

The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well.

The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good product that people actively enjoy using?" problems.

Just your typical late-stage capitalism shit.

Apple using Taboola is so hysterical because of their claim to focus on user experience. Taboola ads are a chumbox of the absolute worst bullshit ads on the market. The only thing worse is the zergnet stuff.

App stores have quality hurdles that didn’t exist in the diskette days. The types of people making low quality software now can self publish (and in fact do, often), but they get drowned out by established big dogs or the ever-shifting firehose of our social zeitgeist if you are not where they are.

Anyone who has been on Reddit this year in any software adjacent sub has seen hundreds (at minimum) of posts about “feedback on my app” or slop posts doing a god awful job of digging for market insights on pain points.

The core problem with this guy’s argument is that he’s looking in the wrong places - where a SWE would distribute their stuff, not a normie - and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And I am telling you, normies are out there, right now, upchucking some of the sloppiest of slop software you could ever imagine with wanton abandon.

I read your other comment - didn't even know about the agents, going to play with them ASAP.

I promise I’m not being snarky here - I don’t understand how people are burning through their $200/mo plan usage so quickly. Are they spamming prompts? Not using planning mode? I’ve seen a few folks running multiple instances at once… is that more common than I think?