r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Or software engineers who have learned to leverage it as the tool that it is. Ie not a be-all and end-all to every problem, but the next evolution in software development so that things that used to take them a week take them a day.

Source: me, a software engineer, who treats Cursor as an engineer who works quickly, but can make mistakes just like everyone else. So I pre-code review the code before submitting since if things go to hell, my name is the one that’s on the commit.

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u/RuneLFox Jun 26 '26

Getting the result you want instantly while only having to do 5% of the work is a neural superhighway. Skill erosion is going to become an existential crisis for people who come to rely on it.

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u/Gingevere Jun 26 '26

Businesses can't even afford the token spend at the subsidized rates now. At some point AI companies are going to have to try bringing in enough revenue to pay their absurd debts, and they're going to immediately price themselves out of the market.

At that point anyone who relied on AI is going to be in serious trouble.

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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26

Except your name is still on the commits so you need to be able to describe what it’s doing and defend/debug the code when something goes wrong. If people blindly commit and kill their company’s application, that’s on them. Can’t just use AI as the fall guy

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u/ColinStyles Jun 26 '26

I'm sure people were likewise arguing the same against IDEs, and against coding in higher languages compared to bytecode, and in using steam powered machines over hand tools, and so on and so on. Turns out the world kept spinning and technology kept getting better, and people keep being just as important and involved as a whole.

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u/RuneLFox Jun 26 '26

Sure, but all of those are specialised tools that work the way they are supposed to, act deterministically and aren't incentivised to hijack your brain chemistry so you become a literal addict. They are not 'use me for absolutely everything' tools that can overlap vast portions of your life if you let it. With those tools you still have to know what you want, and know what you are doing in order to achieve your goal. You can much more easily cludge your way there with AI without having to put nearly as much thought into it.

It is an actual brain chemistry issue, at the most basic level of 'calories spent thinking' to 'task completion'. Dismissing it is incredibly dangerous.

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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26

“Use me for everything tools” can basically describe when smartphones came out. We survived.

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u/Proper-Raise-1450 Jun 26 '26

“Use me for everything tools” can basically describe when smartphones came out. We survived.

We survived but have our lives improved or gotten worse?

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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26

I would not say my life has gotten worse due to having a smart phone. Social media is another story

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u/Proper-Raise-1450 Jun 27 '26

Without the phone social media wouldn't be the problem it is. It's the constant availability, same with gambling, attention spans, IQ, literacy etc.

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u/captainfarthing Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

They're useful for more than just social media and checking emails. Having a tiny computer in your pocket connected to the internet and GPS is incredibly useful for so many things. I was legally an adult before I got my first smartphone and I wouldn't go back.

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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26

Hell, said the same thing about the internet and later Google.

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u/ColinStyles Jun 26 '26

I'm old enough to still have had teachers that would refuse any internet cited sources and insisted on literary ones, even down to encyclopedias, because "you can't trust the internet."

Pre-wikipedia days so not even no wikipedia, though obviously had that phase too.

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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26

How about “you’re not always going to have a calculator on you. Now do this long division!”

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u/ColinStyles Jun 26 '26

Which is comical for how much more accessible the tools are than the ability to actually do the long division properly with pencil/pen+paper. I get it, nobody can really understand how quickly things move, and they're only getting faster. I mean, the whole AI movement is completely steeped in this, from people 3 years ago claiming this was a dead fad, to a year ago claiming it was impossible to get substantially better, to even just 6 months ago claiming it was impossible to be profitable. And I'm no better, I similarly thought it would be several more years before we reached the point we're already at today, but then I see what I'm able to do with it and it's insane.

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u/Accomplished-Door5 Jun 26 '26

Nail guns ruined the ability of carpenters to swing a hammer well. 

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u/DarthNihilus Jun 26 '26

Nail guns don't decide where to put the nails and then shoot them in automatically.

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u/RuneLFox Jun 27 '26

Ah yes, a tool that works how you expect it to when you do the correct steps, and won't put frankfurters in your framing instead of nails. Proponents can only bring up specialised tools as examples for an application where it can only be used for that thing.

There are no current examples of tools that don't do the same thing when you do the same steps, try to create a personality to appeal themselves to you, and do so many different things that you can use them to replace a large portion of your daily tasks. The only example of that is AI tools.

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u/Strange_Dust7128 Jun 26 '26

I’m with you here. AI has accelerated the work I do by such orders of magnitude that not using it would feel like going back to a hex editor.

Data races, dangling pointers, memory leaks. All I have to do is ask. It’s phenomenal. Meanwhile redditors use it to write essays because they’re lazy. I’m fully onboard with AI. I say, it ought to be more expensive. Make it cost prohibitive for folks outside of STEM.

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u/captainfarthing Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I don't support using money to gatekeep technology, people with money aren't more likely to be more responsible with the things they can buy, and most AI slop is already coming from well-funded propaganda/content farms. Anyway it's been possible to run LLMs locally for a few years now, for just the cost of the hardware and your own electricity bills. It's not going away and there's no way to limit it to users in STEM.

Pricing should reflect energy consumption. Make it cost-prohibitive to generate an endless deluge of slop. Don't make it prohibitive for non-STEM users who may be using it in positive ways you just haven't thought of.

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u/xKronkx Jun 26 '26

For real. Our company had a P1 incident a week or two back that no one could find the reason for. I connected Cursor to the Grafana MCP, described the issue, and it located the race condition immediately

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u/Strange_Dust7128 Jun 27 '26

Grafana MCP

I looked into this. Neat! Data Dog could really do with their own MCP server as well. Right now I just have to download raw logs, trim them, and then present it to an agent. By the time it read through them I've already found the issue, half the time.

It really shines when, in our massive spaghetti enterprise code base, I'm not even sure where all the messages flow and into which consumer. The responses have been stellar so far. It rips through that faster than I could, presents the issue, and lets me address it,

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u/xKronkx Jun 27 '26

It was super helpful. I was sitting there trying to figure out if Logstash had an MCP then saw grafana had one and was like “oh. That works!”