Everyone is so annoying about AI

A software developer laid off from a tech company criticizes AI industry leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg for pushing a dangerous narrative that AI will replace jobs, contributing to widespread layoffs including the author's own dismissal along with 4,000 others via email on a Thursday.

Everyone is so annoying about AI Something I've recently been thinking about a lot is how I think public perception of AI would likely be vastly different and positive if the people at the forefront of the pro side weren't Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. In other words, extremely dumb and evil rich guys who somehow failed upwards in life. Like most people, my initial feelings on AI were pretty negative. The pro-AI people reminded me of the Crypto people circa ~2021, but 10x more annoying the Venn diagram of those two groups of people is probably a circle . I found their general vibe to be annoying, and I found Sam Altman et al. to be very irresponsible people with all of their "AI is going to replace jobs and completely change the world and global economy" talk. I understand AI company CEOs are in it for the money and thus they have to market their products, but something about the ways they've always tried to push the tides human beings will be replaced felt notably more dangerous and gross to me than past tech fads. As a professional software developer I feel like I had a front row seat to watching AI and its effects for the past few years, especially since one of the earliest use cases of AI was to make it easier/faster to write code. LLM models continued to get better, AI companies continued to talk their shit about how entire job functions would be eradicated, and tech companies eventually started to mandate employee AI usage. The mandates were pretty wild to me because it felt like I woke up one day and out of the blue everyone was being heavily "encouraged" to use AI all the time or else , even non-tech white collar workers. At my former I'll get to that in a bit company we were given seemingly unlimited and unfettered access to any LLM we wanted, encouraged to ship things faster, and AI usage even became a performance metric for reviews and promotions. All of this happened within the span of 8-12 months. I had started experimenting with AI for software development at work before the mandates started. My first use case was more for linting and code readability purposes – sometimes I'd write a method in Kotlin by hand but feel like there was a way I could use syntactic sugar to accomplish an operation in less lines of code. I'd copy my code block into the ChatGPT desktop app lol , ask it to make my code cleaner, and then copy the result into my IDE if I felt like the result worked and made sense. I still found the pro-AI people to be annoying, but I was interested in giving a new technology a try and found it okay at handling my narrow professional needs at the moment. As time went on I started to feel dread about AI and its effect on my industry and professional prospects. AI companies continued to push their rhetoric about LLMs being capable of writing code faster and better than human engineers. We started to see tech companies pause hiring because they wanted to experiment with using AI to write code instead of hiring humans. This eventually led to companies outright starting to lay off engineers because they felt LLMs were now capable enough to write code faster than them, at a cost that was cheaper than hiring humans. The layoffs scared me because I enjoyed my field and getting to write code for a living, but it started to feel like my days were numbered. During this, it was also pretty obvious to anyone with a functional brain that AI can't actually replace software engineers as there's more to building products than just writing a shit ton of code – AI doesn't always write working code, it isn't great at system design, it doesn't understand company org structures – but it felt like C-suite execs had drank too much of the kool-aid and now normal people who don't make seven figures were going to suffer. The layoffs continued across tech until eventually my company laid me off along with four thousand other people via an email on a random Thursday. I wasn't surprised to get laid off. My initial thought after getting laid off because of AI was okay, I might be cooked . Even though on a personal level I didn't think AI could replace engineers, I figured the tech industry might be completely fucked for who knew how long and I even briefly considered the thought of trying to find a non-tech job. Ultimately it turned out companies with rational leadership weren't buying into the AI hype and I was able to find a sweet new job within a month, at a place that doesn't have AI usage mandates. It also turned out the tech CEOs who have been orchestrating AI mass layoffs immediately proceeded to eat shit and look incredibly stupid – AI productivity gains only appear to be 10% https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-not-10x/ and not the 10x these shitheads had been claiming during board meetings. Lots of tech companies that did major AI layoffs have also been hiring back employees https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/55-percent-of-leaders-regret-ai-layoffs-and-a-major-hiring-reversal-has-begun/91380901 , and lots of companies are even mandating employee AI usage caps https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/02/uber-caps-employee-ai-spending-after-blowing-through-budget-in-four-months/ because they can't afford to pay for it. Capitalism is really awesome. Even through all of this, my feelings on AI have gotten more positive over the past few years and my usage of it has evolved. I now use AI pretty regularly for my software development purposes, in careful and intentional ways. I find Claude to be a pretty helpful pair programmer I can toss questions at while I'm working on things. I like not having to expend a lot of energy Googling or searching StackOverflow for answers to niche issues I encounter. I find LLMs especially helpful for debugging – when I'm trying to decode logs and figure out why my service is throwing an exception I can toss the stacktrace at AI and have it help me pinpoint the root cause faster, which is very helpful during stressful moments where an issue is affecting real production users. I'm really looking forward to local LLMs and open models getting better and easier to run, because I think Anthropic and OpenAI are annoying companies I'd like to see implode. I'm very careful with my AI usage though. I never vibecode I hate that term and practice so much because I always want to understand the code I'm writing and don't want to completely outsource it, especially because AI is frequently wrong and makes dumb decisions I always make sure I understand the code being generated before accepting/committing it. I think using AI for things like writing papers on my behalf or art generation is intellectually lazy and evil, and I would never do that. Using AI responsibly is important to me because I think it can easily become a slippery slope if used wrong or overrelied on. For example, my first year of undergrad was extremely difficult for me as someone in a Computer Science program who had never written code before college. My first semester Intro to Java class iirc I scraped by with a B- kicked my ass and I spent a lot of late nights trying to fix array indexing issues for my assignments. I'm so grateful AI as it currently exists wasn't around during that time, as I surely would have been tempted to overrely on it like a lot of academic students seem to be doing these days. It feels good to know I earned my undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science through the power of my intellect Even today when I think about the Tokenmaxxers https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/tokenmaxxing-ai-agents.html another term I hate I've encountered over the past several years, I never found their ideas or what they were working on to be particularly interesting or helpful – they're basically just spending thousands in tokens just to feel smart and get a high score on a company leaderboard. Lately I've been finding the people on the polar opposite of the AI culture issue to almost be as annoying to me as the ultra pro-AI people. I unfortunately use social media quite a bit and over the last year or so it feels like I constantly see "any AI usage whatsoever is evil and unforgivable" sentiments from people on there. Some of the reasoning is based on reality ex. energy usage https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658 is a valid concern but most of the arguments seem based on misinformation and vibes . I saw a good example this past week with Hank Green https://kotaku.com/famous-science-youtuber-admits-he-has-unhealthy-relationship-with-ai-after-facing-backlash-over-recent-video-2000720908 , where he was incorrectly accused of using AI to write his video scripts but faced backlash by admitting he uses AI as research tool for locating sources he could then read himself. I think there were likely valid things to be concerned about in this situation, but the people who were specifically upset Hank used AI even as a research tool really pissed me off. How is that any different than someone using Google to search for an article? Everyone is so annoying. What sucks is I can't even be truly annoyed with the ultra anti-AI people, because they've been negatively polarized by the pro-AI people screaming for the last several years about AI being the second coming of Christ and replacing everyone and everything. It's extremely difficult to watch a video of Sam Altman talking about AI for five minutes and not think this country should probably shut down every collegiate Computer Science program until we can figure out what the hell is even going on in tech anymore. At the end of the day and like everything on earth, I think AI is nuanced. There's a lot of good and bad to it, but this doesn't fundamentally make it a good or a bad thing. I really wish people had the ability to conceptualize this. There are good and bad things about cars they transport us but people also use them to kill thousands of pedestrians and fellow drivers every year , with coffee it tastes good but can also stain your teeth , and with Whole Foods the hot bar is incredible but everything is expensive and it's owned by Amazon , but everyone seems to agree that these things aren't all purely good or bad. There are ways to responsibly drive cars, drink coffee, and shop at Whole Foods. At the end of the day none of this really matters that much though, and maybe this is yet another reminder that I should consider using social media less. I'm glad to have a job again.