Businesses Wasting Money on Trendy AI

“Unfortunately at this point the art of software development will never be the same. I used to work as a consultant for a decent size firm, when chatgpt hit we had a lot of clients who thought they could do the work with AI , they ended up canceling contracts etc and going all in on the AI psychosis. I realized that I was going to have to drive myself to become an expert in this field or at least expert enough so I could have a conversation about it in technical terms with anyone who I interviewe”

“It is. But AI is not the problem here, is corporations pushing this. Pretty much every engineer I know is trying to fight against it until a C suite basically says "This is happening with or without you"”

“I'm so sick of AI. I saw a graph today suggesting that the bubble peaked a month or two ago and that it's just going to keep going down from here until it crashes out. submitted by /u/Tanta-Reynalado [link] [comments]”

“AI bros seem to think that using AI will make them faster or special . What they dont realise is that the same AI making them supposedly faster is also the one who is going to bury their game in a sea of slop . And alot of the ai game devs have realised this . Go to r/aigamedev and you can already see boundaries being drawn between " true ai game devs that only use a little ai in workflow places " , and " slop creators ai bros" . As ai improves these boundaries will grow furt”

“I had the reverse happen in my last job. I used to be an IT teacher in a high school; one of our mandatory training days was spent listening to lectures about how to integrate AI use into every aspect of classroom teaching. The ONLY good info I got that day was the "icebreaker exercise" when the presenter asked random people how they currently use AI in the classroom. One teacher said she got CONSTANT parent complaints that she uses too many big words and hard to read sentences (she us”

“This is still 100% valid. In 3 months nevermind 3 years we are going to need an influx of experienced genuine engineers who know software to fix all the shit AI is breaking globally. You can not do that without knowing your fundamentals”

“a lot of the eng overhead is gone post claude ai. Eng velocity faster 2x - 3x depending on what is being compared, I have seen what would have taken a bigger company/team a quarter, now taking 1 full stack eng 1-2 sprints to ship. PMs research process is cut by 20% to about 1/3, for me mostly on time writing queries and hypothesis forming/testing, baselining current state. My focus on 1) align - rallying the teams 2) research - extracting info and organizing it has not changed much. So I am only”

“No, I think I understand it perfectly well. You just failed to qualify it sufficiently. You stated that people who can't do things without AI are not smart. I can confidently guarantee there are far more things you cannot do without AI than there are things you can do, with or without AI. By your own qualifications... You are not smart.”

“Certain sector/dept will take hit with the AI, mainly computer field/receptionist/front desk and some entry level like Accounts payable clerk. However, these are small fraction of the entire population. I can't imagine a large population losing their jobs because of AI. Billionaires need consumers to buy their product and/or invest in their company. Matter of fact, even sports team need at least 80k plus fan base to buy tickets and attend the game. If unemployment rate ticks upward, its a co”

“Is anyone looking at creating/building something on the side while still working in IT to prepare for potential disruption of AI? If so, what kind of things are you looking into? I currently work in IT/Cybersecurity doing systems engineering and integration making ok money. Everyday I can't stop thinking something bad is coming our way, given all the layoff headlines and economic uncertainty. If not, how are you staying level headed and sane? submitted by /u/SageMaverick [link] &”

“If what you're selling amounts to prompt engineering and skills, good luck.”

“"And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either." Dude literally said shut up it's a useful tool. Agentic AI is just LLM with loops. It doesn't imply any sort of unattended use, or "Vibe coding" So you leave your religious argument behind dude. It's a useful tool and has”

you're absolutely missing the point

“Making sure that hardware and software like each other... Think cache-line alignment on steroids.”

“You did exactly what I said, you took him out of context. He says AI is a tool. Why would you ask a tool to program on your behalf? Thats not what a tool does. Would you ask a hammer to build a building? Agentic AI doesnt exist, its a grotesque misuse of a technology Think before you post and leave your religious ideology behind”

“I agree that devs will continue to exist However: while it's true that someone without low-level experience will turn out a lot of garbage when the LLM suggests some low-level thing that they don't understand Speaking as someone who does a lot of low-level stuff, they are actually stupidly good at low-level optimization and debugging for CPU code. You need to set them up with tooling so that they can run their own experiments and add printfs and stuff like that but: it's very clear t”

“Yep, definitely sounds like a tech lead in a web company where they write everything in JS and think it's the only language for everything. top 3 programming languages across server, web, and desktop clients This sentences makes any real engineer puke a little in their mouth, because this is why 99% of modern software sucks donkey asshole.”

This comment is just not true

“Not with scale, it's not I don't even really think that true in a major way. Firstly because most devs even in big companies don't need to think about scale that much and if they do its basically let AWS or whatever handle it, and also I think that AI can probably handle scale if you prompt it right. Btw any heavy use of AI will effectively be a vendor lock in of your code base, or at least a technology lock in. Meaning that if AI were to become unavailable for whatever reason you ar”

“Well I surprsingly agree with most of your post, but that doesnt mean AI is so good, it just mean the average engineer is really bad. This happened around 2020 due to the influx of bootcamp grads which lowered the bar significantly. I blame the "My Life as a Female Software Engineer at Google" videos which showed some Asian woman drinking matchas and showing off her 6 figure salaries and indoor table tennis setups while doing 1 hour a day of actual work. And of course the pandemic whic”

“Most new grads can’t even write a simple API endpoint without using AI. These new grads are different”

“I think you would be lauded for saying you used it, but probably unnecessary. Management is cheering everyone on to train the bots.”

“In the 90s Bill gates and his corporate minions scared everyone into believing if they didnt "learn computers", and "learn Office", they would not be able to get a job. That they would be "unemployable".And computers were new and to some kind of exciting to some threatening, and people internalized this fear and indeed imitated their corporate masters to stay employed. Very few rebelled. Yes, some secretaries cried at their desks, I was witness to it personally, but there was no stopping corp”

“It can, but it depends of course on the skill of the people. AI makes it easier to produce trash, because if you design it manually and write it manually, then you really have to think through stuff to a certain degree. Now it's easier to ignore the output. Most people are bad/mediocre. At least in my company...”

“Countering all the doom posts I see here lately. There is a lot of nonsense regarding AI replacing developers being said on this sub by entry-level devs who have no idea what they're talking about, that I want to say my two cents and alleviate some of the fear being spread around here. I focus on low-level programming with C and C++, working in areas like operating systems, compilers and CPU microarchitecture-driven performance optimizations, and I am yet to see a single success story of an”

“I am an experienced dev but I don’t agree. This used to be the argument. AI does it all now.”

“Why can't AI be used during the processes you highlighted? I see it the same as AI writing code is not the same as AI replacing a software engineer. You still need the end to end process. Define, plan, build, review, ship etc. it's the same for PM proper process you mentioned”

“Agree with what you said but I do think AI will replace us. Between one engineer, 10 in India, and unlimited AI they don’t need much more.”

“I'm not surprised at all. So many tech startups are simply existing technologies rebranded and with a pitch deck full of wishful numbers.”

“Last month, got laid off. My job is in a very AI exposed field - not that AI can do my job, but that the people pushing AI are saying that it can. I could sense the layoffs coming for years and that knowledge took such a toll on my mental health. I’m exhausted from all the stress. So that’s the backdrop for the conundrum. When the layoff happened, I was very very well prepared. I was already having conversations with people I know at another company, and this expedited that process. Let’s call t”

“I keep hearing that AI detection engineering is going to save us from the holy terror of SIEM bills, and ngl I would love one nice boring month where the data ingest tab does not look like a tax bill. Has anyone actually used it to cut noise, trim junk detections, or stop paying for logs nobody reads except during a panic? I am trying to stay hopeful, but the finance team is acting like every alert we keep alive is a personal insult, thanks in advance submitted by /u/MaleficentColleg”

submitted by /u/Beyond_the_one [link] [comments]

“Everyone seems to be asking whether AI valuations have gone too far. I’m starting to wonder if that’s the wrong question. The more interesting risk may be what happens if AI demand remains incredibly strong. AI doesn’t run on optimism. It runs on GPUs, servers, data centers, cooling systems, electricity and enormous amounts of capital. Someone still has to pay the electricity bill. 😄⚡ And all of that is beginning to collide with something every investor and business owner eventually learns to r”

“Title: How would you professionally push back on a coworker creating mandatory AI-based training for civil engineering/contract management? I work in local government in a civil engineering/public works environment, managing capital projects, consultants, contracts, construction, and related engineering work. A longtime coworker, whose background is primarily inspection rather than engineering or contract management, has become heavily dependent on AI for emails, plan reviews, technical question”

“JPMorgan recently put global AI-related capex at about $5.5 trillion through 2030. Goldman’s number for just Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet is already $5.3T over a similar window. Either way, that’s not software-cycle money. At that scale it stops looking like another SaaS wave and starts looking like the old buildouts: railroads, the electrical grid, autos, then the internet. A new technology shows up first. Then the physical world has to get bigger to carry it. Power plants, data center”

you're speaking in escher sentences.

“In the long run, it's actually not been cheap at all for them but that's good for me. I know this is a few days late. Work in marketing. Business is kind of booming right now from mom and pops because places ARE taking a hit from it and are in psudo reputation damage control mode. The days of any publicity is good publicity are long over. One post that garners bad engagement can absolutely tank them. I don't know if you've seen what 1 bad local facebook post can do to tank a mom”

“> I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.After watching this space for a long time, I think the growth angle is... untested.All the FAANGs were slowing down after Covid. They boomed as the money printer went brrrr, then they plateaued. They've also kind of covered a lot of their potential their main total addressable markets, with the big exception of clouds, which probably have at least 5 or 10 years of growth as workl”

“I certainly agree AI is decaying quality but there are clear trade offs. I read so much on X about guys building with AI software and blowing up.... I'm old enough and been in the game long enough to know most of it is absolute rubbish. But it does make me think. We use AI to help us manage our websites and it does a good job, but never ever without human supervision”

“So in the short term, it seems likely to deflate the cost of software and other products/services produced by professional workers. If it becomes good at other forms of production (i.e. physical things, physical labor, etc.), perhaps it causes currency exchange to become pointless.There are a few caveats to this that everyone seems to leap over, one very important one is that the a priori control of production, land, and natural resources is not egalitarian, and there's no reason to really belie”

“Same as it ever was. The business acumen, the judgment, the why behind decisions, difficult calls…and having good taste. Will always matter more than how experienced you are with AI.”

“> The question for doomers is why is this time different?Difference 1: The tools themselves only exist due to rampant exploitation of vast intellectual resources that were created, catalogued, and published with the intent to help people learn, not machines. And this was frequently done against the explicit expressed wishes of the holders and creators of those resources.Difference 2: The tools do not work deterministically. Every run of a prompt is effectively pulling a lever on a slot machine.”

“Such stances are very easy to make when there is no financial incentive or no competition with any meaningful money on the line. But as soon as there is competition, they don't care about "AI policies" if it is the means to make a lot of money.The best example of this is security in open source software which maintainers have no choice but to use AI to protect themselves before an attacker can use AI to find and build exploits for security vulnerabilities faster than they can patch it.In some se”

“So to summarise, don't sell AI, but solve a problem they have faster with AI I guess”

“Late 30s, I work at a product company, where everything is about delivery. Correctness or "doing things correctly" is not a priority because we need to deliver fast. Of course, with AI, this is 100x worsened (or improved, depending on your POV, I guess). I was promoted to manager early because I joined as an early engineer, but since then, I feel stuck in my role. Now I am a "IC lead", which is basically someone who executes. I see people who maybe less technical, but who can”

“Its just a tax and an annoyance, and in a very competitive and difficult economy.I am already receiving notices from some EU countries that they will want sit downs on how we use AI, and apparently they have the right to demand access to detailed designs and source codes. Fine, whatever, a waste of time, but why would anyone start an AI company here, knowing that there will be bureaucrats focused on making that startup's life harder? Considering AI talent is mobile I'd think a lot of such talent”

“So I have three thoughts about this: The first thought is this is likely mostly survivorship bias. Yes, the claims that get to the humans are the ones that went wrong, and the mode of failure for LLMs is less that they get within 99% all of the time, it's more like 1% of the time they do something insanely dumb. At which point your customers are pissed off. That's kind of obvious, and it sucks for the humans who have to clear up the situation. But it's still a win for the vast majority of cases.”

“Management has been putting a lot of pressure on myself and team to automate our jobs as much as possible. He literally told us that he wants to remove our day to day tasks without giving us clarity on what we’d be doing after said automation is complete. Then when we can’t automate a task, he places us on some PIP program to get it done. Pretty nasty directions and outlook, in my opinion. I feel like he wants to replace us all with automation, AI, and finally outsourced help. We’ve all been aro”

“Where is the money coming from?It's coming from regular companies spending their own money on using AI. I.e. Profitable companies deciding they want to use AI for various reasons and spending their own revenue on said AI, whether it be Claude Cowork, OpenAI ChatGPT Work, OpenRouter, Nebius Tokenfactory, models hosted on BaseTen, Fireworks, etc, tools like Lovable. Or every piece of cyber software which are ALL using AI heavily these days.It's really not as complicated as AI-doomers like to make”

“The definition of intelligence is changing. For a long time, intelligence was heavily associated with learning something, remembering it, understanding it, and then using that stored knowledge to create something new. But that process consumes enormous cognitive load. If AI takes over part of the retrieval, memory and summarization burden, the higher-value skill shifts somewhere else: the ability to move between tasks, domains and models, connect them, judge which connection matters, and produce”

“"There’s no way in the universe that director would be able to get a fleet of AI agents to autonomously do what hundreds of humans work on" There's a way ! me ! when a director wants that, i am all in after explaining fast and vaguely that it's a bad idea, i push AI all the way in his company. And when i am done, I quit right away : no one wants to be close a nuclear bomb !”

“If they think AI will replace Product Managers, then they don't understand what product managers do. What AI will do (and I'm experiencing this personally) is allow PMs to get more done faster, primarily converting information/insight/decisions into actionable information and action. What we're more likely to see are PMs who are well-rounded (with marketing and technical capabilities) to strike out on their own, as the startup cost, especially getting to the MVP stage, is now cheaper”

“For many organizations, AI adoption looks great on paper. But beyond that, it just kind of fizzles. John Munsell explained this as: you need 3 things moving together at the same pace: How much efficiency people are actually gaining day to day. How complex the systems and workflows getting built are. Governance- the rules and oversight that keep things from spiraling. Miss the sync and you get problems either way. Teams build fast and sophisticated stuff with no guardrails, and now you've got”

“Totally agree. AI doesn’t always need to be something people interact with. If it quietly removes a time-consuming bottleneck and makes the process faster, that’s probably where the real value is.”

“You're right or wrong in relation to a given statement.If your point is just that there may be an AI bubble, then yes the fact that it hasn't popped yet does not prove it wrong. But that's not what Ed Zitron is saying; he's making very specific statements that happen to be wrong time and time again.As many said in the comments, it's common for doomers to keep predicting a crisis, every month and every year and so on, until inevitably a crisis does occur and they claim they were right. That's not”

“What exactly do you mean by AI slop here? Is it about the documents generated using AI or vibe-coded prototypes, or both, or something else?”

“AI is actually helping a bit, long term. The more unskilled people build slop the more work will have to be re-done later at higher cost. Software dev salaries only really took off after the outsourcing boom of the 2000s. Of course the job market being overwhelmed and IT being saturated are probably bigger deals.”

“You’re applying pre-AI investing to a post-AI world. Yes, a decade ago, a startup raised money and spent 90% of it on people. The people built software which had incredible margins. Build it and then print money for ever more. That’s not the case any more, these startups no longer have incredible margins, they’re not collecting $100/m per user and banking $99 of it. They’re collecting $1000 and sending $999 of it to Anthropic and OpenAI.Revenue numbers are vastly inflated compared to pre-AI but”

“[ChatGPT] ★★ 2/5 (v1.2026.237) — I swear, Open AI is making every subscription tier intentional dumber. The mistakes are becomes increasingly more rampant and fat less excusable. The model will continually make the same mistakes over and over, even despite corrections. The mistakes are anywhere from small to glaring, and even if they were only small mistakes, they’re so frequent and inexcusable that they add up significantly. I swear, they’re dumbing down this model, hoping people don’t notice,”