The bullshit will continue until the grifters move on to something else. If you can figure out what that is, you'll make some serious bank!

> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic.

Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.

> What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic.

Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days.

Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end.

First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point.

Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.

Please stop this linkedin relatability theater.

What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using.

> Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.

I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.

But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.

> AI Confidence Theater

That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.

> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.

If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"

My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.

It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle.

First, we have this section:

But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.

Then immediately after:

This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.

(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it

There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans.

I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.

It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.

>Show me something truly life changing.

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

as a note, i found this particularly funny:

"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."

Sounds funny coming from someone at Lovable!

> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.

Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.

This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.

Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with others.

For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.

Like all popular things in our culture there has to be people who point out it's all hype or fake marketing or overrated or not a big deal. That's always a safe position to take and a reliable way to get attention

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.

A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.

The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.

> Show me something truly life changing

Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?

People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.

Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.

No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.

I can e-mail wise now with my bill and pay it. it's AWESOME. I've used a bill that was in Hungarian for a EUR account in Austria. No issue.

My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years.

I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.

Ending ZIRP right near the crest of the current AI wave has done irreparable damage to the discourse. Businesses take time to actually adapt to new technology, but for some reason everyone believed every sluggish, giant corporation when they did the thing they always do and tried to put a positive spin on their layoffs. I am obligated to point out that using AI as an excuse for tech layoffs has occurred since long before these models could do anything useful.

I actually do believe that AI has profoundly negatively impacted the software engineering job market, though, but not by reducing the number of jobs per se. I think so far the most impactful thing it actually did was destroy the job interview and flood literally every single channel with AI generated crap, making it much harder to even get a foot in the door.

Meanwhile, for all the hooplah of layoffs, we still haven't seen a year with more tech layoffs than 2023, the year after ZIRP ended in the U.S.; then in 2024 and 2025, it went flat, to "bad but certainly not unprecedented" levels.

Working with modern AI tooling, I find it to be very impressive. Hard-to-ignore impressive. It does give you the nagging feeling that some day, you won't be needed. I mean, let's face it: most people knew deep down that there couldn't be anything that special going on in a human brain that mimicking it would be categorically impossible; I think we just aren't sure exactly what the threshold will be where we aren't needed. The reason why the goalposts keep moving is because we genuinely never interrogated the different ways in which we bring value, so we don't even know what AI needs to be able to do to fully replace us at our jobs. We're starting to get an idea, though.

Yet I've even had Claude Fable go into a death spiral that it seems unable to recover from on its own. I've seen Opus 4.7 with a fairly intricate harness completely and utterly fail to triage an issue down to the root cause and instead just make things up. I've seen GPT 5.5 insist repeatedly that there was no bug and that the tests must be wrong. Personally, I've gotten the feeling that the current AI architecture asymptotically approaches a point where it can truly replace humans but never quite gets there because it just gets stuck in a ditch too often.

But obviously we would need less people with AI... Probably? Yet, I'm not even sure that's true yet. Why?

Well I mean, I've seen the rise of actually useful LLMs across two jobs now and both times it's still been a struggle to reliably hit sprints and quarterly rocks. Not only that, I have observed that while AI is capable of enabling non-programmers to do very impressive programming work, a thing that actually brings me much joy given that I don't believe being able to construct programs should be some elitist thing for people who spent their lives on it, I have also noticed that it is ridiculously easy to completely discount the value that a skilled, experienced programmer still brings when driving an LLM. Seriously. And I've began to notice patterns; a lot of people go for cheap models and tokenmax, but senior engineers are more choosey, especially opting for frontier models and higher thinking when it comes to code review. And they're much better at filtering out the noise quickly without dropping serious, substantial issues that are just very tricky to understand.

With all of this in mind, I absolutely believe that some companies really are now, in 2026, laying off programmers because of AI. But I think they are just jumping the gun onto a fad and making a huge, stupid mistake. If you were really doing this right, you would do that after you found yourself in the situation where you truly didn't need the capacity, and not in anticipation of no longer needing it. And I'm guessing like most organizations, a lot of these organizations laying people off are still not reliably hitting their goals, and even if they were, would be better off directing this improved cadence towards setting more ambitious goals... I mean you already invested so much time and money into these engineers, you may as well get the value out of them, right?!

There may come a day when a lot of us are out of a job and have nowhere to really go, and if that happens, we'll all just have to figure out where to go from here. In my opinion though, a lot of this is insane tech CEOs crafting a self-fulfilling prophecy.