this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Programmer here. They can be a useful tool if used correctly. They are great at writing unit tests, useful for upgrading older code, and really useful as a semi-intelligent autocomplete.
If used incorrectly they will generate a giant mess that works briefly but becomes impossible to expand on, full of duplicated sections that makes maintenance super difficult, and have weird logical flaws.
I prefer using agents running on my own desktop rather than paying somebody for it.
The one off scripts ive had it write to do something for me usually work great, but when I glance at the code its horrific. But its a one off, it does its job then goes bye bye.
Like I had to scrape a website the other day and only needed it to work for a few days. Claude did it.
Nice. I appreciate actual programmers sharing their actual use cases for AI.
I want to add my use case here because it mirrors yours, and should get a few laughs.
I've had the same experience writing a quick one use messy script with AI - but it contained a very subtle bug that pretty much wiped out the data I was trying to convert.
I did have a backup, but it wasn't particularly recent, so I only lost a couple of days of work.
I lost my appetite for AI help on full quick scripts, but I still use AI for a line of code here and there.
I feel like I should use AI more to generate unit tests, the risk/reward is probably better.
Honestly, that's fine. I've been coding for 30 years now, not one bit of it from 20 years ago still remains.
Everything is ephemeral in the end, we are all only but dust on the wind.