Posted by mips_avatar 12/3/2025
The distinction between "real products" (solving actual problems) and "hype products" (exciting investors) reflects a pragmatic engineering perspective.
The situation seems less about AI itself and more about corporate dysfunction using AI as cover for broader organizational failures.
They should focus more on data engineering/science and other similar fields which is a lot more about those, but since there are often no tests there, that's a bit too risky.
For now, the human dissenters have a lot of leverage because AI still makes very clear and obvious errors sometimes, and it would be a political nightmare for a decision-maker to be accused of erring on the side of AI by recognized human experts who dissented. I wonder if there will come a time that AI opinion would be on par or even favored over the human expert because the human would be considered more fallible. This doesn't even have to be true - it only has to be sufficiently perceived to be sufficiently true.
(Protip: if you're going to use em—dashes—everywhere, either learn to use them appropriately, or be prepared to be blasted for AI—ification of your writing.)
Having em-dashes everywhere—but each one or pair is used correctly—smacks of AI writing—AI has figured out how to use them, what they're for, and when they fit—but has not figured out how to revise text so that the overall flow of the text and overall density of them is correct—that is, low, because they're heavy emphasis—real interruptions.
(Also the quirky three-point bullet list with a three-point recitation at the end with bolded leadoffs to each bullet point and a final punchy closer sentence is totally an AI thing too.)
But, hey, I guess I fit the stereotype!—I'm in Seattle and I hate AI, too.
IIRC (it's been a while) there are 2 cases where a semi-colon is acceptable. One is when connecting two closely-related independent clauses (i.e. they could be two complete sentences on their own, or joined by a conjunction). The other is when separating items in a list, when the items themselves contain commas.
But introductory rhetorical questions? As sentence fragments? There I draw the line.
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For me, the issue is that they’re misused in this piece. Em dashes used as appositives carry the feel of interruption—like this—and should be employed sparingly. They create a jarring bump in the narrative’s flow, and that bump should only appear when you want it. Otherwise, appositives belong with commas (when they’re integral to the sentence) or parentheses (when they’re not). Clause breaks follow the same logic: the em dash is the strongest interruption. Colons convey a sense of arrival—you’ve been building up to this: and now it’s here. Semicolons are for those rare cases when two clauses can’t quite stand alone as separate sentences; most of the time, a full stop is cleaner. Like this. Which is why full stops should be your default splice when revising.
Sprinkling em dashes everywhere—even if each one is technically correct—feels like AI writing. The system has learned what they are, how they work, and when they fit, but it hasn’t learned how to revise for overall flow or density. The result is too many dashes, when the right number should be low, because they’re heavy emphasis—true interruptions.
(And yes, the quirky three-point bullet list with bolded openers and a punchy closer at the end is another hallmark of AI prose.)
But hey, I guess I fit the stereotype—I’m in Seattle, and I hate AI too.
Now we're using the same logic again: "Well, you just need to learn to use the AI before someone else does."
And if anyone doubts that the world can move on without the software engineer, remember that it moved on just fine after eliminating the toothpaste tube fillers. The world kept turning, just a little colder and more indifferent each time another role disappeared.
Maybe instead of pretending this time is different, we should focus on writing the best epitaph we can.
My team has relied on the Microsoft stack for over a decade (dotnet, GitHub Actions, VS Code, MS extensions), and I can say that the overall quality and “polish” of their releases has declined.
I try to help where I can—filing issues for outdated docs, contributing to dotnet/core, joining discussions about .NET 10 still not being available in Ubuntu APT feeds, reporting and helping resolve issues with MSSQL drivers and SqlClient on GitHub, etc.
But every time I interact with someone at Microsoft, I can’t help but read between the lines: they seem slightly demotivated by the company's shift toward an AI-first focus.
It's sad.
I understand why people are irritated by this.
However, recently I tried the GitHub Copilot agent with VS Code using Claude Opus 4.5. It literally implemented, tested and fixed entire new features in minutes, that otherwise would have taken days or even weeks of routine repetitive work from me. All while mimicking style and patterns in my existing codebase which made me instantly understand exactly what it was doing. I found it to be an insane productivity boost and I can see how it might be affecting hiring processes in numerous industries, especially in software engineering space.
Look, good engineers just want to do good work. We want to use good tools to do good work, and I was an early proponent of using these tools in ways to help the business function better at PriorCo. But because I was on the wrong team (On-Prem), and because I didn’t use their chatbots constantly (I was already pitching agents before they were a defined thing, I just suck at vocabulary), I was ripe for being thrown out. That built a serious resentment towards the tooling for the actions of shitty humans.
I’m not alone in these feelings of resentment. There’s a lot of us, because instead of trusting engineers to do good work with good tools, a handful of rich fucks decided they knew technology better than the engineers building the fucking things.
You know who's NOT divided? Everyone outside the tech/management world. Antipathy towards AI is extremely widespread.
An opinion I've personally never encountered in the wild.
The only non-technical people I know who are excited about AI, as a group, are administrator/manager/consultant types.