The one bright spot of LLMs is that we've learned exactly how morally and creatively bankrupt this industry is, and how fast people are willing to throw away everything they said they cared about for decades - craft, understanding, efficiency, detail, all of it - just to cosplay competence and bandwagon their way to groupthink targets they don't even realize were made up to manipulate them.
Christ it's embarassing.
Because the only thing I bring into this world that I don't care about looking at or thinking about or doing better is shit. My own literal, physical feces. I've even had to care about other people's shit, I've changed diapers, picked up after dogs and shovelled fertilizer.
You're don't even look at your code now? You're proud of it, because productivity, velocity?
When was the last time you talked about your happiness or self-worth without using the word "productive"?
Answer the question.
Good morning, how are we all doing today.
@mhoye tired, exhausted, still unemployed and applying to a giant luxury hotel with horrific employee attrition, because it's just a job, as opposed to wading thru LinkedIn and trying to find an IT job that isn't with or for AI.
@mhoye I often wonder how often these people step back from their work, look at it, and legitimately say "I'm proud of that."
@dabeaz The people who tried to convince us that if we ship work we're proud of we shipped late are somehow never in the office at 2 AM with us fixing what we shipped.
Jun 20, 2026, 12:45 PM
@sean @dabeaz @mhoye the word I find myself using over and over again is "passable."
Modern AI is very good at creating "passable" things. Not "good," let alone excellent. Not "worthwhile." But they appear, at least at first glance, like something you might want, not yet knowing how fucked up it actually is when you take it apart and LOOK at it.
"Passable."
And I fucking hate it. I liked it better when AI generated surreal, blatantly insane nonsense. THAT was at least fun.
@jimsalter @sean @dabeaz @mhoye
The enemy of the Good is not the Bad, it is the Good Enough.
Jun 20, 2026, 2:57 PM@PhilSalkie @jimsalter @dabeaz @mhoye
Good enough is good enough - it's just not a low standard.
"Perfect is the enemy of good"
@sean @PhilSalkie @jimsalter @mhoye I think the greater enemy of good and good enough is not caring in the first place.
@dabeaz @sean @PhilSalkie @mhoye at the VERY least, "passable" is the absolute mortal enemy of IMPROVEMENT.
@mhoye not a vibe coder but
When was the last time you talked about your happiness or self-worth without using the word "productive"?:kaltsip:
@mhoye I'm proud of my code but that's probably why I'm self-employed. 🤦♂️
@mhoye Productivity claims have always been mostly false in software development, because the vast majority of software projects don't pursue metrics or use valid metrics. Popularity has mattered more in programming language and process selections.
@mhoye as I put on a mental health slide a while back:
who you are != what you do
career != purpose
productivity != fulfillment
@mhoye actually that fits the fact that ai logos are all stylised anuses quite well
@mhoye@cosocial.ca Craft? Efficiency? Caring of details? No, no, these weren't thrown away. They were already gone decades ago.
I'm not so sure.
I still have a theory that A LOT of folk got into tech because it pays really well. They don't care about craft, understanding, or design because that's not their motivation. To them, it's just a job to pay for what they want to do, but their parents disapprove of.
Give them a magic box that thinks for them while they still get to collect the paycheck? Yes, please, may I get more?
The folk that actually give a damn about what they're doing, how their code is being used, and who gets impacted by it is probably far smaller than we'd feel comfortable acknowledging.
@jrconlin @mhoye Maybe we'll go back to a world like when I graduated in the mid-70s and didn't expect a career as a programmer (we didn't use the term "software engineer" in those days) and people will study Computer Science because they find it interesting/enjoyable.
I've fixed more hideously broken code and broken system designs than I care to remember... it wouldn't surprise me to see LLM stochastic parrots generating better code than the average programmer (self-styled "software engineer").
Fortunately, I'm retired and don't have to live through any more "software revolutions".
Heh, my "break things" is probably a bit higher than "fixed things" but very much in the same boat as you.
Really trying not to fall into the No True Scotsman Developer trap here too, but it's really depressing how few folk are interested in code as craft.
@jrconlin @mhoye Depeds on where you are ... most of the things I "fixed" at Yahoo were badly broken and my "fix" was to make them less broken (and a lot of the infrastructure was broken, also the management). At Google, the infrastructure I used had its flaws; but if I'd designed/built that infrastructure I'd have made a different set of mistakes, and I doubt that my mistakes would have been any better.
Caring about code quality pays off in total cost of design/build/deploy/maintain but most management doesn't understand that - low quality code is a hidden tax on the business.
Heh, yeah, Yahoo kind of set my second career path. First thing I wound up doing was actually documenting Makepage, for which I paid the price of becoming the Makepage guy. Spent the bulk of my time there connecting teams that were doing things similar to each other just to get them to talk. At least that got me involved with YDN, where I met some insanely talented folk.
Always interesting to meet a fellow alum.
Sorry, I don't have any more "Did You Yahoo!" license plate rames left
@jrconlin @mhoye At least for me, these folks have made tech insufferable. As someone who’s unemployed, I’ve mostly given up on returning to design just because even the interviews expect so much performance and having to stomach the bile of talking up ~the power of AI~ after endless rejection is demoralizing
Jun 20, 2026, 12:40 PM@jrconlin @mhoye Yeah I don’t want to yell for the kids to get off my lawn, and the culture of coders pre-aughts wasn’t as welcoming, let’s say, as it could have been…
… but there were lots more, “Nah, no degree. I just kind of took to it,” folk in the workforce then. They didn’t choose coding. Coding chose them.
More recently, I’ve seen team members freely offer that they’re coders b/c their mother told them it was a good field to get into. And their work ethic & product reflected exactly that. It’s like Willie Nelson sings… “🎶 Let ‘em be doctors and coders and such. 🎶”
That said, I don’t hate AI. Pair programming with AI is fantastic. Agentic with the wrong manager creates a tech debt house of cards, but that just means my job has changed to helping energetic but careless and practically inexperienced juniors (AI) with PRs.
The best critique I’ve read:
Legacy codebases at one time were understood by a human. AI codebases have never been.
Jun 20, 2026, 12:44 PM
@mhoye see also “AI Corruption”
https://dierk.github.io/Home/AiCorruption.html
@mhoye
人蠢冇藥醫
@mhoye
I could not have said it better
Jun 20, 2026, 9:39 AMAs an ASP I can say without a doubt that I'm not wired for go along get along group think, lemming style. I'm also habitual. So, unhand my native language, knaves.
And put away your idiot new tech,
and just slow your roll. I'm on a 10 year plan, not a 10 minute plan.
I will not be thrown under a bus.
@mhoye bold of you to assume anyone outside of programmers ever cared about craft in programming
Jun 20, 2026, 12:49 PM@mhoye Besides taking away the one thing I enjoyed about my job and the environmental harms, the thing that pisses me off most about this whole thing is that some already wealthy dipshits are getting even more wealthy off of the unpaid and unacknowledged labour of millions of open source contributors their LLMs were trained on.
It's just pure theft.
@mhoye Extend that to the entire C-suite, and you now understand how much of a waste of space 90% of ALL management in EVERY industry is. ALL of that management BS that they preach about efficiency, incentivizing, right-sizing, just-in-timing, management miracle nonsense is all just a load of complete and utter horseshit. AI management just exemplifies the worst of it in the most obvious way, by using that crap to force us into something we dont need that doesnt work. But it was always lies.
@mhoye the many thousands of people who lost their jobs, and were thrown out like trash, the people who were telephone operators or journalists or taxi drivers, might have some thoughts here on the itnegrity of tech
@mhoye the saddest part is the rationalisations.
I had one LLM psychosis sufferer try to compare LLMs to electricity 😬
Jun 20, 2026, 9:56 PM@mhoye Yep. I miss helping people learn an awful lot and I miss the money 🤦🏽♀️, but I don't miss the "computer biz" at all. It wasn't going great before fake AI ... now it's fully transparent how misaligned it all is. And had been for quite some time. Hope you have better days! 👩🏻🌾
@mhoye Amen to that.
Jun 22, 2026, 3:42 PM@mhoye Read first post and thought:
Shouldn't the lesson we learn be that these people enriching themselves have *that* as their goal, not any kind of benefit to anybody?
YUP.