I will never understand how is it that such idiots repeatedly make it to the top.
It’s partly the fact that hundreds of millions of people the world over, possibly several billion people, believe that they only got there because they were competent and do nothing to stop them.
it’s all about the networking at that level. Doesn’t matter how much of a blithering idiot you are so long as you know a guy who knows a guy to get you in.
MBAs and such are trained in being confident without knowing anything besides different business grifts.
csuites and ceos, are all the result of nepotism, there isnt such a thing as working your way up ofr those positions.
So they thought it would be free forever, and are surprised by the usage based pricing? I wonder what will happen when ai companies need to be profitable and increase prices accordingly
they thought by paying for AI in its current form will lead to less employee overhead , thereby reducing cost. which dint happen.
I replaced all my software team with agents which can work 24h a day on the product and now none of the software works and I’m out $600000 waaaaaa
- Exec
The bigger problem might be what it will cost to get things back where they need to be. Probably a lot more than $600k. How many of the knowledgeable developers are willing to come back to clean up the mess? Any of them? And at what salary? Possibly a lot more than they were paid before they were kicked out. If you can’t rehire the original developers then you might find others with the required technical skills - but probably not with the domain knowledge. And now costs and times increase further.
Upvote for Samus. 👍
Better than Drake, fo sho
Actually they understand the code that they generate very well. But for existing codebases they make a big mess, because they don’t see the same abstractions humans would like to see.
600k is not a lot of money for a software team or for AI though.
It’s like these assholes have never heard the phrase “too good to be true”.
People who get paid exorbitant sums for doing exceptionally little probably try to avoid that concept
They are usually the ones setting up the too good to be true situations, so they probably never thought they would be on the receiving end of one.
Anyone who fell for this grift deserves it and much worse.
People, usually who have never done the job, still love to argue that it can compete with software devs and infra engineers.
The sad part they don’t see (or maybe care about) is while it can’t currently (and absolutely not llms) they’re pushing a narrative that we should automate everyone and everything which is dangerous and moronic.
Well, we should automate everything that can be automated - for the benefit of everyone. Last part is something not seen on worldwide scale ever, just yet
I understand the argument for automation being used where appropriate to benefit us and allow us the freedom to focus on other things, however, I’m skeptical due to the social behavior already occurring from the powers that be expressing the desire to enslave us, if not just kill us, using the mere concept of AI as justification.
And funny enough, pushing this hard will only leave a bad taste regarding any mention of artificial intelligence or automation. Whereas if these people just fucked off they might have been able to sell whatever usefulness it has in the correct places.
It happens every couple of decades with AI. Since it’s a broader field than most people think, we have a pretty long cycle of a new development looking exciting, people getting way too excited and optimistic, the development being exactly what it was promised to be, and then people getting disappointed and avoiding anything with the AI label. Then we decide that because we’re used to this new thing, it can be used in stuff as was originally appropriate but it no longer qualifies as AI, because “that’s not AI, it’s just ___”.
Oh yeah. I can sign under every word you wrote
The people who have never done the work love more than anyone else to talk about how the work should be done better and cheaper.
Broadly this sentiment stands for most professions.
It’s funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it’d happen to them. FAFO 🫡
an astonishing 29 percent of [execs] had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.
The headline combined with the quote just make me laugh so much, I love it
This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.
Those same idiots have been in charge of everything for decades, blindly doing whatever suited them.
They got duped and didn’t have the technical competence to see it or trust their staff to negotiate it.
Every IT / Developer out there knew it was a bad idea. The C-Staff was sold by the billionaires that you will go AI or you will be left behind.
My own CEO is simultaneously telling us to use AI for as much as we can and telling us to reduce costs as much as possible.
The “you’ll be left behind” nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol
The sales pitch is:
All your competition is going AI. They’re be producing 10x the work with mouth breathing morons at the keys, while you’re stuck paying millions to subject matter experts.
They’re scared ot death that the tenuous hold they have on their market segment will be severed if their competition outflanks them in this, so FUD wins.
This isn’t just in industry or tech. I work in the academy. You would be shocked how many people from administrators all the way on down truly believe this. That, without any proof, this technology is going to make everybody a billion times more productive and that any graduates who don’t have this is a foundational skill will surely not survive in the future workforce.
“it’s technology and science, it must be good!”
Man, you would be shocked how resistant to tech and innovation some of us are unless, I guess, you promise the world with your racist chatbot.
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and professors using it to screen out AI themselves, or using it to make lectures. this is for university level,
That is a fine hypothesis, but that has nothing to do with how I run my classes. Or anyone in my department for that matter.
Yeah, that isn’t how this works. You don’t want to be the one using the software while it’s still in beta. Wait until the dust settles before committing to anything. Besides which the super-urgent "You have to buy now!" FOMO sales pitch is a classic strategy for scammers.
Someone else can output more slop than us!
And faster slop! Turbo slop even
on the grift since its basically a rehashed version of crypto.
That’s because they bought into the pitch that AI will replace employees (or at least large number of employees) they understand that they will still need to build tooling that would facilitate that and believe that once other companies will say they eliminated employees this way the companies that are “are left behind” will be stuck still needing employees that will catch up to this plan and refuse to help company to get there.
I told my boss this:
- Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
- All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
- The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
- As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.
I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …
It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.
Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.
He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.
The 3rd or 4th “industry expert” tells them that things are “moving fast” and things that were impossible months ago are now reality. It’s designed to make them distrust their own subject-matter experts. They thing, ohh POTV, they’re just not educated and up to speed.
Yeah. Local LLM stuff is great when you want to shove a huge pile of documentation into a model trainer and make a more intelligent search. Two of my vendors have implemented it, and it’s more useful than a traditional indexing search tool, though you do have to verify the results (which is not much more effort since with a search you’d have to skim the document to find the info it matched anyway).
But for general “do everything” tool, yeah no. It can’t read and understand your entire database, codebase, business process, etc.
Honestly, I’ve had a rather interesting experience with AI. I was very adverse to LLM usage at first. Later I sort of figured out that I was more adverse to the energy around AI than I am AI itself.
I knew the models sucked at large tasks. Trying to get an edge on the matter though, I started asking myself, how can I get the model to perform better? I figured I could pass over the AI hate stage and get right into the AI professional stage… at least a head start.
So I began experimenting with local LLMs, LLM harnesses, and various governance tools like
jai. I decided against Claude Code and Cortex because they’re provider specific — instead using OpenCode so that I can use whichever model I desire. Then I began building out a SKILL.md repository for tightly scoped tasks likechange-review,security-analysis,refactor,architecture-review,grill-me,feature-design, …I’m still thinking through some of the project needs. I want something that lets an agent work, while treating the agent as a kind of helpful adversary. You should be able to configure workloads that designate models, context, available tooling, skills, permissions, session length, inference level, acceptance criteria, and human-review stages. It would also allow for session switching, model switching, agent deliverable handoff to another agent, … not to mention, your VCS should know and respond appropriately if an agent ever pushes code. Don’t trust it by default.
These workloads should be version controllable, benchmarked, …
Anyway, a lot of that is speculative. Just where I’m at now, controlling context and skills manually, I’m already seeing much better results.
And no, I don’t have the AI do everything. I just find smarter ways to decompose “everything” into much smaller tasks that are easier to review and scrutinize.
But also, I push for local model usage in my organization. I don’t want my success to mean success for the AI companies. Fuck the AI companies.
I was forced to dogfood it. I found that for my specific needs, it made me super productive. I generally make Claude write Ansible jobs, I store all my secrets in a vault that it never gets access to.
It can do tremendous amounts of work at my command in relative safety as long as i provide it protected tools.
Now, that said, I burn a hell of a lot of tokens moving at that speed. When the ass falls out of the market, i’ll still have all the ancible stuff I can reuse.
Neither Claude code neither codex is actually vendor specific, they just don’t tell you that you can config other providers, including local
However opencode is pretty nice too, so if you like it, use that. I personally find that opencode with GLM 5.2 or Kimi K2.7 isn’t actually that great, it’ll hallucinate more than Claude code or Codex with their respective first party models. I think it’s the models themselves rather than opencode itself though, as when I use GPT for planning and hand it off to deepseek flash to do the actual work, it’s more or less fine.
I suspect behind the scenes, the first parties are sending your requests to multiple targets and sending you back quorum.
also the environmental damage, noise pollution,etc its causing that the dot com dint cause.
yep. these mba types have gutted half of id, and are changing id - ID - to unreal engine projects.
fucking hell
That’s sacrilege.
true. and you know who has really detailed art of sacrificial altars? id. get the OG’s back together!
Except this time they’ll have a hard time blaming the devs and other workers.
I mean they’ll sneak around it, but maybe just maybe the blame will not be distributed? Lol who am I kidding.
The’re apex predators, they don’t blame anyway, just mass layoffs due to non-profitability ()
non-profitability(){ if CEO_makes_less_money_than_they_want(); return true; return true anyway because fuck the proliariat }if (bankrupt) find_new_ceo_job(parents_network);
Yeah, I’m glad you woke up there. They will always find a way to blame the developers.
they will just lay off more people to stave off the debt, and then to hold the industry to gether outsource, and hire only some senior devs while ignoring entry or juniour level people.
Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”
And we hope they go broke, dont pay their bills, cause a panic sell on AI services, which causes private equity to panic sell everything… which pops the bubble… and leads to the literal version of ‘its raining men’ on wall street as executives and profiteers have their horde of ill gotten gains evaporate in seconds.
… too much?
Damn, I was almost there. Keep going
I’m thinking the last scene in Fight Club. Yeah, that would be the one you’re looking for.
everyone will just end using deepseek, assuming they arnt charging.
These execs were the ones we were supposed to replace with AI.
The first hit was free.
- Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
- You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
- You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
- AI company sees they have you and start jacking up rates. If you could afford paying for people before then you have the $ to pay high rates.
- Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn’t working out as expected.
It’s particularly funny because I’m pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren’t taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.
Pretty much the model for so many internet services or streaming services.
Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y’know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I’m not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y’know, passive index fund investors.
So, they’re earning money on token generation but not overall (including training)?
Openai had 2025 6billion in revenue and 20 billion costs on compute. So just to run the models to get 6billion they need to pay 20billion r&d and marketing etc get on top of that
I’m sure there’s a term for it but this is like when a company keeps securing funding from investors so they keep growing to try to outpace costs with the illusion that you’re profitable when in reality you’re not. Just like WeWork.
It’s just a Ponzi scheme with extra steps.
Venture capital
Private credit. Get ready for the tsunami.
No, my understanding is that they’re bringing in revenue on token generation, but it’s exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they’re afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they’ve reduced the amount they’re subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.
I can’t find a good citation for this, though, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they’re operating at a massive loss either way, and it’s a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.
In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That’s…we’ll have to see what happens on that front.
- AI company hijacks your processes, trade secrets, and market to offer the same thing for cheaper than you can. Raises rates for competitors to cover its own token use and simultaneously drive the others out of business.
Yeah it’s basically the enshitification model
With the quirk that the service was shit to begin with.
Maybe but it’s like crack for CEOs
It’s just newsworthy when it happens to companies.
- They see people have gone to new companies thatre private unionized and value customers/employees/etc replacing them as they had done with their employees
- The company asks for them to come back to be laughed at as the people watch for them to slowly sink and be replaced with many better alternatives to take their place
- That is happening right now and we all can make it happen faster
Is this real life, or is it just fantasy?
Have you heard about “Tokenmaxxing”?
Since many AI companies didn’t have a reasonable limit on the number of tokens for the amount of money you paid, companies started telling their employees to use as many tokens as possible. LLMs improve with more tokens (although there are diminishing returns).
So users tried to exploit the ‘lure offer’, and AI companies had to change the billing. It’s still below the real cost, but no longer this insanely expensive option.
Oh it was all over the tech news. Reddit was trying to guess the mystery company that got the massive bill.
It’s such a perfect grift
Cant wait to see their reaction when AI replaces them
This has been the case ever since things that seem great, like google cloud computing…and your little project just bankrupted you because you left a tap open over the weekend.
Here’s a real a cost saving prompt:
“Translate the contents of every single document in our databases into as many languages (including dead and constructed fictional languages) as possible.”
Now you can fire the one Hispanic guy you hired because you assumed he could speak Hindi.
I swear, execs are some of the most gullible people on earth. I know some of them, and none of them are very bright, just very greedy.
They’re not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.
I think it’s more sociopaths rising by being sociopaths and then promoting gullible idiots they can use and control with no issue, then blame when shit goes wrong
And nepotism.
And cronyism.
Coming from the upper-middle and upper class and having attended the right schools and become mates with the right people is very highly correlated with becoming a top level executive.
My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn’t made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn’t do half the things it said it did.
He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn’t do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.
As we’ve seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you’re wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.
And if you always fail upwards, it’s very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.
Man, if all it takes to be a CEO is to make stupid decisions, they should just hire me. I’m the master at that.
