I have a great fear for the near future. We are going to see virtually all mainstream software, including for essential services, use AI hallucinated vibe coding.
All because the bourgeoisie simply want to save a buck, and simply hate the working class that much
At some point things will become so bad that the monopolies will fail.
It’s not possible that consumers will keep insisting on failing from the same con from the same parties all the way into non-working software. (And they are getting pretty close to non-working already.)
Unfortunately I don’t believe that’s how it’ll work.
Monopolies hold total control of essential services and goods in the marketplace, and we’re already seeing in the US what happens when those monopolies see threats of competition. The state becomes the slave of the monopolies, and all competition is taken out. If not through crushing businesses (such as policies hostile to smaller businesses), then through closing the market to competitors (such as the TikTok ban, or the tarrifs).
Im sorry but I do feel schadenfreude for all the conversations I had 2-3 years ago with programmers who smugly kept telling me that AI and enshittification wouldn’t come for them because you can’t bullshit their job. So many computer people weren’t interested in talking about politics because they “knew” their little corner of expertise was unassailable and so they put their fingers in their ears and acted smugly above needing to unionize and build community structures in the programming industry.
It turns out, as I had been desperately trying to get across to techbro very linear thinker types, that management doesn’t care if AI actually works or if their firing of you sabotages the company, they are still going to do it if they buy the narrative and they already bought the narrative a long time ago.
Organize and unionize or the programming industry will continue to enshittify and programmers will be treated worse and worse even though their skills aren’t any less vital and AI code sucks so bad it costs companies more money to fix the problems AI creates than to just hire human programmers to do it right… None of this has to do with rationality and the idea that capitalism has a tendency to point towards rationality is simply not backed up by evidence.
Software dev here; 100%. I just want to point out that 4/5 times management hasn’t bought in on ai so much as they suck partner dick who have a vested interest selling it. These aren’t the rubes, they’re just further down the con-man line.
Could not agree with you more. Best time for our industry to get serious about unionization was probably after the .com bubble burst. We could have leveraged the degree to which our skills were needed in that era and headed off a lot of today’s problems if we had strong unions in place, but sadly it’s still probably one of the lowest density sectors for organized labor. Now would be a good time to start pulling heads out of asses. I think many of our brothers and sisters in tech are starting to wake up to reality now that we’re in our 5th-6th straight year of widespread layoffs for “reasons.”
It can start with honest and direct 1on1 convos in order to thwart groupthink nonsense, and build on things from there. A simple organizing committee is a great first step.
I really wish people actually listened to the crazy architect Christopher Alexander when he shat on the entire programming industry in 1996 for not having a value system around the basis for beginning to build architecture and systems in software.
