AI - Assassinating Intelligence

This is going to be a strong rant about AI and its complications across the world. I’ve tried messing around with it, while I feel it’s useful in certain aspects - the hardware costs, mental and environmental impact are not.

It might also be the fact that I am tired of looking at low-quality software written by AI where people can’t even be arsed to do a simple review. Oh, and DLSS 5 just pushing me over the edge, we’re paying for GPUs that don’t even render our games properly anymore.

I’m all for non-tech people being able to create solutions for their own problems, but lately it’s just been an AI slop machine where you input tokens and get a shiny new product that will have barely any users. Is the AI helping us or are we helping it? A question to ponder.

Let’s talk about the multi-level problems it has created.

Low Quality Software #

Well, we had this before? But it’s just worse at this point.

Do people even feel good creating software like this? I personally don’t. What happened to the creativity and passion that we used to have?

All I see is a bunch of people who are just creating software for the sake of creating software, without any real purpose or intention. It’s just sad. I completely relate to the tweet below by Naval.

This has been quite a pain point for most OSS projects; it’s hard to identify legitimate PRs now vs AI slop. One of the key examples is the cURL project¹.

People are just poisoning open source contributions now by creating slop PRs without a second thought, and even the responses are AI? Have they completely stopped using their brains at this point? It’s infuriating.

To add drama to this, a famous self-hosted and vibe-coded OSS project: Booklore has been deleted² just because of sheer ignorance by the maintainer. If you want to know more, read this subreddit post: PSA: Think hard before you deploy Booklore.

I can go on and on about this, but I think you get the point.

Hardware & People Costs #

Do I even need to say anything here? We all have seen how most PC hardware is unaffordable now. Earlier it was crypto and now AI, one after the other.

RAM prices alone have risen to such an extent (almost 3x in the last 3 months) that it’s hard to justify buying a new PC, even if you need it. Apple’s RAM pricing is making sense now, which is concerning.

It doesn’t stop there; GPUs, SSDs, and hard drives are all going up in price. The same 2TB SSD I bought a year or two back is now 2.5x more expensive.

To top it all off, the layoffs happening in the tech industry are just a testament to the fact that engineers are just getting replaced by AI or just getting fired to keep shareholders happy. It’s a sad state of affairs.

The Token Dilemma #

The part we all love, spending millions of tokens and burning through our bank accounts. Well, at least companies like OpenAI definitely like it.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m only bashing AI without actually using it. I’ve burned a decent chunk myself in Cursor and it’s been a great tool for me.

Using AI feels like gambling and gaslighting in a way not gonna lie.

But oh, did I mention the fact that everyone is just ready to give complete access to their data and systems to an LLM? We’ve seen multiple cases of this already such as OpenClaw, which is a security nightmare.

Some of the recent examples:

• OpenAI recently signed an agreement with Department of War, though they mention it won’t be used for surveillance - it’s hard to trust them at this point.
• Moltbook which turned out to be fake got acquired by Meta??? What are people even doing?

Well there certainly are some companies and individuals that are doing great things with AI, but they are few and far between. This is a good example of something that happened recently and is honestly good to see.

Infinite Money Glitch #

This ties back to the earlier point about hardware costs. A select few companies are just investing in each other in what feels like a giant loop designed to keep stock prices inflated.

Microsoft pours billions into OpenAI, OpenAI spends that money buying GPUs from NVIDIA, NVIDIA’s stock skyrockets, and then everyone points at the rising numbers as proof that AI is the future. Rinse and repeat. SoftBank throws $40 billion into the mix. It’s not innovation driving this, it’s just capitalism at it’s best.

OpenAI, which will likely never be profitable, is now valued higher than some of the most established tech companies on the planet. A company that burns through cash faster than it can generate revenue, and yet investors keep lining up. It’s not a market anymore, it’s a collective delusion backed by hype and FOMO.

A Reality Check #

I’m not sure what the future holds for AI, but I know one thing for sure: we need to be careful about how we use it and what we’re giving up in the process.

In my personal opinion, we should only look at AI as an assistance tool and not as a replacement for human intelligence. I hate the term vibe-coded software, it’s just a lazy way to justify writing bad software. There are definitely exceptions to this rule, but most of the time it’s just a complete joke.

Developers are now spending more time configuring LLMs, skills, AGENTS.md files, and 10 other things than actually writing code. The tooling around AI has become its own full-time job. No, we don’t need 100 orchestrators, agent frameworks, and MCP servers just to ship a feature.

To be fair, there are areas where AI genuinely shines like documentation, boilerplate generation, and surfacing relevant context through tools like MCPs are all solid use cases. But those wins don’t justify the circus we’ve built around it.

If you made it this far, you probably agree. Or you’re an AI summarizing this. Either way, thanks for reading.