AI Anxiety, LLM Lunacy
20 May, 2026I hate AI for pretty much all the reasons anyone should. It's crass and tacky. It's ugly. It's sycophantic and pathetic. It steals creativity. The people who like it are people who see the end and don't care about the means. They are people who always resented you if you had actual technical skill and expertise, because when they see that skill they didn't see someone they should respect. They saw something that they had to pay for. They wanted to pay less for it and now they see their chance. Maybe your individual salary won't go down, for now, but it means there are fewer job openings in your department. It means there is more work for you. The expectation is rising and the implicit message is if you don't keep up you're done.
I remember going to a conference a couple years ago. It was specifically a data analytics conference. I figured there would be technical talks there. There weren't. All of the talks were geared towards leadership who then probably brought everything back to their team and said "do this!" without any context or understanding or anything. They just didn't want to look like they were falling behind. They hate you. They've always hated you. The mask is coming off.
Initially I was freaked out by AI and bought the hype, as far as coding goes at least. Eventually I got on the "AI isn't that good" cope train. I would read about new models coming out and how revolutionary they are and how I'll be left behind if I don't use them and think "of course the car salesman tells you that you need a new car". I felt smug in my ability to see through the sales pitch. I felt confident that eventually all of this will backfire and they'll start hiring juniors again. I thought OpenAI and Anthropic were cynically exploiting the tech layoffs that happened right before ChatGPT blew up in 2022 or 2023 or whenever. They were crediting themselves for disrupting labor when it was really a bunch of layoffs that would have happened anyway. Maybe now I wonder if the layoffs were preempting the LLMs. Maybe they had insider knowledge.
I don't know.
The longer it goes on the more it feels like cope. People aren't talking about the AI bubble bursting like an inevitability anymore. In fact I haven't even heard anyone mention that in the last month or so. I guess it is here to stay.
I feel depressed about it all. The worst people you know won. They resented you for having a skill. For trying. For having expertise that they didn't understand, but they knew they had to pay for it. And they resented that. They wanted you for free. They've got the next best thing now. Who knows. Maybe you will be free in the future.
When I was young I was entranced by the idea of coding. It seemed almost mystical. It was like the closest thing you could do to actually being a mystic. Speaking incantations to create something. It was fun to solve puzzles. It was fun to see something work. It was fun to build things. Coding was fun. That was the very first call to printf I ever made: "Hello, world! Coding is fun!". It doesn't feel so fun anymore. I'm sure everyone gets burnt out, but now it's just. What even is it?
I didn't study computer science in college. I studied geological engineering. People in my life told me it was a good idea, and I convinced myself I'd like it. I did like some of it. The environmental stuff was kinda neat. Hydrological models were cool, and if the class wasn't at 8:00 maybe I would have done better. Maybe I would have gone down that route.
When I graduated I spent a couple years doing bullshit data entry and then decided to take some actual computer science classes at a community college. It was the only thing that really got me excited, and the longer I went on without making inroads into anything related to my first degree, the more I felt like I should just cut my loses and start over. In retrospect I was only two years out from graduating. I probably could have given it a little more time.
I ended up becoming a business systems analyst, then getting laid off, then a business intelligence analyst (I tried for dev jobs but never got any), then a manager. I became depressed in that role. I still felt green. I felt like I had never had a mentor so how could I mentor others? Those three jobs spanned 8 or 9 years and the entire time I kept telling myself "I'll become a developer some day".
My company created a new dev position in 2025 and I applied for it. I got it, not because of my developer experience but because I had five years of domain knowledge built up. If I hadn't gotten it I would have left. I was off the back of a blackpilling Netsuite conference that I just could not give a shit about.
This was the end of 2025. AI had been established but I kept telling myself it wasn't that great. They needed me. They needed my skills and my ability to write code.
Now I feel like I slept walked into this. In 2024 I got a wild hare up my ass. I (briefly, and barely) dated a girl the year before who worked in wildlife and it inspired me or something. Or maybe I just hoped if I did something like what she did it would win her back. Stupidly. I thought I could leverage my degree in geological engineering to work in something environmental. Plus there were things going on in my current industry that were giving me second thoughts. I also felt at that time that AI was going to win, so time to give up the software developer hopes. I thought about going to grad school. I thought about moving to another state. I thought about moving across the country! I genuinely had a moment of "I'm going to do this!". I applied for a job in New York! In Albany! So far from Salt Lake.
It all petered out. It slowed down. I felt ashamed. I felt scared. I didn't do it. I just kept working as a manager, and then the dev job opened up and I applied. Part of me hoped I wouldn't get it. Now I feel stuck.
To get a little speculative sci-fi on you, here is my vision of the future. This isn't schizo rambling. It's me analyzing systems and motives and resources, and I could be wrong. I probably will be...
Eventually the work done per resource consumed for AI will surpass human beings. A human does around 8 hours of work in a day. Needs some amount of water that I don't care enough to look up. Needs square feet to live, a yard, a family, hobbies, green space, a community, fuel for their car, food, yada yada... Put all that in the denominator and work in the numerator. Now put what AI needs in the denominator. The numerator for AI is a little spotty right now, but it will probably grow, and the denominator will probably shrink over time.
We're fucked if that is the case. The middle class will be mulched for bio fuel. Or may as well be. They'll keep a slave class of laborers around who will have no leverage because there's 8 billion people who are now useless to them. Maybe they'll just liquidate as many people as they can. Needless wars. Human wave attacks. Extermination camps. Who knows. People will be expendable. More so than they already think of us now.
Socialism or barbarism. We chose barbarism.
Claude, fix this and don't make any mistakes.