It's been hard putting in to words what, specifically, I dislike about the current AI mania.
There are, of course, a bunch of reasons to dislike the current revolution. The disruption to a job I enjoyed doing, the source of that disruption and their motivations, the ever-so-slightly sub-par quality of the work AI does. There are reasons outside of tech to really dislike AI, but none of those have been quite what's been bothering me.
It's the chaos, the “everyone's a coder now” liberty that means now everyone has not-invented-here syndrome, and there's no practical barrier to stop you inventing whatever “it” is, here, again. From writing your special, one-weird-trick AI Skill.md that makes you so much more productive (citation needed) or so much more cost-effective (citation needed), to creating your own tool that you always needed but couldn't get anyone to sign off on. The overwhelming, disorienting, what-is-it-this-week, chaos. Everyone's got their own thing now, nobody bothers to work out how other people are solving this problem because they can just solve it themselves with AI, and that's quicker than spending half an hour doing the research.
Which leads me to the primary use-case I can see people using AI for regularly. The thing that everyone seems to be doing all of the time.
AI lets you circumvent your employer's vendor approval process
With, it has to be said, as side order of letting you avoid doing all that nasty research into whatever the problem is you're actually trying to solve and whether it's already been solved.
So, now, instead of deciding to build or buy it's quicker, easier, and so much more satisfying in the short term to just “build”. AI will give you a personalised, custom version of whatever it is you need, inferred from a bunch of times other people have already solved this problem, without ever having to deal with researching either the problem or the solutions. You don't need to get the vendor approved, because your employer has already signed off on your AI subscription, and most likely your cloud hosting provider. You can whip up something exactly suited to your needs in an hour or so and be on your merry way.
Except,
So can the person next to you,
And the person in the office two doors down,
and all of you can do this all day long, everyday.
So, congrats, you have a beautiful stock management tool that you're using to track your macguffins, and now your employer is running a dozen custom-made tools for all sorts of use-cases and everyone's so much more productive. Your finance department are thrilled that they can stop denying purchase order requests, because that was a hassle, and, let's face it, they were a week away from writing their own tool to review and automatically triage all requests for new tools or vendors needing approval.
Smash cut forwards a few months and you're a bit peeved that nobody is tracking their macguffins in your tool, but the folks two doors down have written an MCP for their tool so now everyone is just asking ClodGPT to track the macguffins and you only discovered that you're not the only one when somebody asked you for an MCP so they can add your tool into the context of their new agentic workflow.
Smash cut forwards a year, and half your companies (rapidly growning) token budget is consumed fixing bugs, shipping patches, and injecting extremely niche functionality in the dozens (and multiplying) internal tools it now maintains, each with their own very specific slice of the overall picture. Probably all talking to each other via exposing an MCP and having “agentic workflows” ferrying the data between systems on a regular schedule. Fortunately for everyone involved, none of the tooling works so well that anyone lost their job, but, you do spend all day asking computers what they're actually doing.
And, I'll be honest, I hate that for you.
But, you'll probably think it's great. You've used AI to solve all your problems, create some new problems and then solve them again, and you felt so productive doing it.
And, that, that last part, that nagging suspicion that you'll be so much happier like this.
That's what really makes me sad.