Reverse the argument, does it make any sense?

"Every time a (whaling ship crew, police force, oil executive, etc) gets angry at protestors and sprays them with (water cannons, rubber bullets, lawsuits), they are more likely to join them!"

Consider what a job with no joy means for the ongoing mental health of your staff, where the main interaction they have all day is with an AI model that the person has to boss around; with little training on norms. Depression, frustration, nonchalance, isolation, and corner cutting are going to be the likely responses.

So at the same time as you introduce new tooling, introduce the quality controls you would expect for someone utterly checked out of the process, and the human resources policies or prevention to avoid your team speed running Godwin's law because they dont deal with people enough to remember social niceties are important.

Examples off of the top of my head of ways to do this are: - Increased socialisation in the design processes. Mandatory fun sucks, a whiteboard party and collaboration will bring some creativity and shared ownership. - Budget for AI minimal or free periods, where the intent is to do a chunk of work "the hard way"; and have people share what they experienced or learnt - Make people test each other's work (manual testing) or collaborate, otherwise you will have a dysfunctional team who reaches for "yell in all caps to make sure the prompt sticks" as the way people talk to each other/deal with conflict.

The way to justify this to management above you is the cost of staff retention - advertise, interview, hire, pay market rates, equip, train, followed 6 months later by securely off boarding, hardware return, exit interview means you get maybe 4 months productivity out of each person, and pay 2 months salary in all of the early job mistakes or late job not caring, or HR debacle. Do you or your next level up want to spend 30% more time doing this process? Or would you rather focus on generating revenue with a team that works well together and are on board for the long term?

The answer most of the time is "we want to make money, not spend it". So do the math on what staff replacement costs are and then argue for building in enough slack to the process that it costs about half of that to maintain it/train the staff/etc.

Your company is now making a "50% efficiency gain" in the HR funnel, year over year, all by simply... not turning the dial up to 10 on forced AI usage.

Framed like that, sounds a lot better doesn't it?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

While it is a spectrum around when you choose to use AI, what seems increasingly common in my experience is some people trying to go "all in", feel frustration and burnout when they are relegated to babysitting an LLM; get angry that it has made a mistake, misinterpretation or simply left something obvious out; then thinking it's user error/they didn't prompt well enough/it is their fault. At the same time, they are increasingly cognitively blind to mistakes at a review stage, so they find out the hard way in production and enter into a cycle of hyper vigilance/distrust/justifiable paranoia.

In those cases, it's a recipe for skills loss and depression over the long term and a vicious cycle.

Here's some of the literature I dug up when looking at what is the potential risk to cognition when you don't enjoy what you are doing.

Working memory is "gated"; you selectively process information relevant to a goal - or why you need to turn the radio off to reverse a car. (Numerous papers take it as a given, can't find a specific one developing the exact model of gating)

On working memory and trainability: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.43 Working memory is (potentially) dopamine responsive, and expanded by use/training.

On building mental models, writing something down activates more of your brain than typing (cognitive offloading): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

I would argue that typing is better than just reading, and programming requires some extra elements - as you cut and paste to rearrange, run tests, iterate, spatially navigate to where various areas of your code is; so is likely closer to the findings around handwriting than the study. But I don't have specific studies on that.

On reward ($) as a proxy for enjoyment/flow state; and motivation; these two used similar basic designs to experiments https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-09949-1

"Participants performed a delayed-estimation orientation working memory (WM) task with reward cues indicating reward levels at the beginning of trials. The results revealed that motivational incentives significantly improved WM performance and increased pupillary dilation during maintenance. These findings provide evidence for the modulation of WM maintenance by reward through enhanced top-down cognitive control processes."

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/43/8549 > "During the task, the prospect of reward varied from trial to trial. Participants made faster, more accurate judgements on high-reward trials. Critically, high reward boosted neural coding of the active task rule, and the extent of this increase was associated with improvements in task performance"

You can also infer from their experiments that low reward = less care exercised.

I feel like a lot of these papers aren't really surprising, but they do measure something that many people have probably felt is true but can't prove.

While these papers don't talk about AI or decline in skills specifically, it's reasonable to say you don't get many of the benefits when it is low reward/passive task execution; where you are leaving review comments that are just reprompting a machine - you know it's not a person, so it feels even lower value to engage than a standard code review might.

I think overall, the rule of thumb around when to use AI should be closely linked to how painful / low reward a task is likely to be. Debugging something with a 10 minute build/test loop and a mystery problem that is not easy to control? AI party. Writing a complex but fun set of business rules? Run it on your wetwear while it is still giving you a sugar hit. An "easy" bug you have stuffed up fixing three times in a row? Push through a bit of discomfort and frustration; but fall back to tooling when you have invested reasonable efforts and are starting to feel slightly fatigued.

How do people keep finding and using it?

How do complaints or feature requests keep arriving?

Why is the published to an audience that doesn't exist?

Or is it fair to say the project has published in public, so has contact with a very broad community already?

Your counter argument to this is to just be contrarian and imply they are a jerk... because, well, you don't agree with them. You didn't add substance to the discussion (facts, evidence, argument seeking middle ground), you just sought to set fire to someone because you were uncomfortable with the dim prospect you might be wrong/guilty of acting like this/be the subject of the criticism.

Do you see how this undermines your point of view/actually re-enforces the validity of the criticism?

You make one really good birthday cake. Following the success of this went to your local school fete out of the goodness of your heart and set up a cake stall, had a complaints and suggestions box on the table, maybe even had a donation tin out. You know it's out of the goodness of you heart because everyone will SEE you doing this and maybe you'll get hired by the local bakery.

But then it's a bit of a long day and you start screaming at everyone who came up to you for wasting your time, rejected requests to not put broken glass fragments in the cakes, get into a fistfight with the local health inspector who pointed out you need certain food prep hygiene practices. You get big mad, and leave your stall in a huff, where hapless strangers stumble across your cakes only to find they are now covered in bugs and get sick from eating them.

Would this be acceptable or unacceptable behaviour on your part? Are you as the cake stall operator taking advantage of the the commons in any way (donations, showing off your bake-folio?) Are you damaging the commons or people visiting the commons? Does your free speech expressed in cake form outweigh the rights of people to tell you to change what you are doing? Does your freedom of expression mean you should never be accountable? Should people be thankful that you let them have cakes covered in bugs, even if they get sick as a result? Does the local health inspector who is an expert in a domain that overlaps with everything food have any standing?

This is a contrived thought exercise; obviously.

But I would bet that you clearly identify that violated social norms aren't great; you would agree there are expectations about access to a commons have implied standards of behaviour for all parties; you have expectations around quality vs general safety, etc.

- Don't publish a code of conduct and then be an absolute asshole to contributors (pick a lane and stick to it)

I feel there is a lot of performative policy published, which at the end of the day is lip service. Actual users or contributors come along and follow the guidance, expectations, etc? They then find themselves treated like a hostile entity and there is a weird prevailing attitude here that's "fine".

How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?

Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648770/unethical-behavior-g...

This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.

We know this pattern of behaviour is not beneficial - in the context of NPD the worst version of this is becoming an enabler - https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-enablers/

While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.

It is murkier as the involvement of some of the original creators in Ruby Central is there, so there are claims to being the original copyright holder applicable to some areas by a very small number of individuals, none of which who are the newly added maintainers, or Ruby Central as a whole entity.

Objective tests you yourself can perform.

1) How much of the publication talks about himself? Why is that relevant?

2) How much does it directly provide links, context, history? Can you find the opposing point of view directly linked from it, or is it omitted?

3) From reading the content, does this person represent the board, or not? Do they make any conflicting claims that are difficult to both be true at the same time?

4) A coup d'etat is a "a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government"

Were the people who lost access acting as a governing body? Was the loss of access sudden and unexpected? Did the loss of access follow any of the rules of the governing group? Did the loss of access harm individuals?

With the answers to the above, reflect on the following:

Why would someone write about themselves, their experience, etc for 6 paragraphs? Would you say it is clear they have only been appointed since Jan 2025? Or are they trying to establish themselves as an authority? If they are not attempting to appeal to authority, why is it relevant?

Did they actually apologise? If so, to who? Is it specific? Does it clearly articulate what the person did, admit fault, recognise harm? Or is there downplaying of impact, vague language, downplaying of involvement?

Does it characterise the contrary point of view in a way that trivial uses the concerns? Are the conversations "emotional" or is it implied the people experiencing the negative act are? Is the author emotional?

If you were the person or people affected, would you accept this explanation? If you were the person taking these actions, would you explain why like this? Why or why not?

I strongly encourage you to do this exercise, putting aside feelings or initial responses even if you think I am wrong.

Between the initial removal of access, then giving it back after explaining it was a mistake; the people involved started a conversation about governance to clarify/fix things.

https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61

The conversation terminated because the majority of those people then had their access revoked again.

When weighing the facts here; which group or claimant has the most evidence for their claims? The technical folks with lots of commits over many years, or the treasurer of an organisation who says the impetus for this was a "funding deadline" so all access had to be seized?

"I WANT to apologize ... that I feel awful."

"How can you possibly talk to someone about changing access, when multiple people tell you no, you are wrong?! A coup is the only way!"

"Because funding deadline, we executed a coup, which will keep everyone safe from hostile actors... Taking over accounts and access"

I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners. Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.

An incredibly common pattern is a maintainer thinking they know better in an area they are inexperienced in, and rejecting change because they don't like the sound of something or are unable to see past their cultural biases.

We know this by another name - not invented here.

Common, practical areas this occurs in boring open source business CRUD applications:

- Address models aren't thought out. "Why would anyone want geocoding? What addresses don't fit the US style?"

- Phone numbers get modelled as plain strings and all of a suddenly "but changing them to be standardised is really hard"

- Company, brand, account structures rarely add URLs or links to external datasets. What possible use is a wikidata ID?

- Why would I put in vCard/CSV/Schema.org/any other import/export?

All of these areas are often ancillary to the primary purpose of whatever the application is, so get rejected out of hand.

But the use cases they enable for users - who don't use the application in isolation - are then completely blocked.

- Map, route or visualise spatial data mashed up with other datasets. Send people to remote locations without formal addresses.

- Hook up phone systems to make your system run for teams with centralisation, integrate SMS based messaging, etc.

- Join to public datasets to understand more about your customers (food safety, licencing registers, corporate entity registers, contract management systems, etc)

A typical maintainer is going to say "wait, what; my accounting system is all about finance, none of this is relevant!"; but they miss out on what users really want in many cases: interoperability or data portability.

The problem is the maintainer's frame is in their world view; and if they aren't dogfooding their project they aren't running into their users problems - how likely is it the maintainer is the BI analyst, or the low level data entry person, or from a country where QR code payment is the norm, or a million other considerations?

Your conclusion from that is "but they are doing it wrong", while also claiming they are saying things they didn't say (0 net benefits, useless, etc).

Do you see how that might undermine your point? That you feel they haven't take the time to understand the tools, but you didn't actually read what what wrote?

"When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.). This may seem like a relatively short amount of time, but it is also important to consider that before resuming work, our informants worked in an average of 2.26 (sd=2.79) working spheres. Thus, people’s attention was directed to multiple other topics before resuming work. This was reported by informants as being very detrimental. In some cases, the physical or desktop environment is restructured, which makes it more difficult to rely on cues to reorient one to their interrupted task. For example, a blinking cursor at the end of the last typed word can enable one to immediately reorient to that document, whereas if other windows have been opened, it can be hard to remember even which document had been worked on."

And "We found a trend that showed more externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the same day (53.3%) compared to internally interrupted working spheres (47.6%), X2 (1)=2.97, p<.09. Externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the average in a shorter time (22 min. 37 sec., sd=53 min. 52 sec.) than internally interrupted working spheres, (29 min. 1 sec., sd=55 min. 43 sec.), t(987)=1.92, p<.055."

So no, it does not say 23 minutes and 15 seconds in that paper.

But to say: "the paper never goes into details regarding the recovery time between finishing the interruption and getting back to the original task." is flat out incomplete, because they are reading the followup paper to the original work in isolation; and haven't considered that a number of reports summarized the findings of that (22 m 37s) as "about 23 minutes". The way it is written implies the research is all wrong, rather than more accurately stating "I can't find the exact source of a quote but it's broadly 22-23 minutes, not 23m15s afaict".

There is also some irony in "ctrl+f", "23" being explained as the methodology for review on the topic of attention span for complex tasks...