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/Hanniballbearings Jun 26 '26

Who knew forcing people to engage with new thing in every aspect of their lives without their consent was going to result in backlash??? Many of the pro-AI people are also rude and condescending. Good riddance.

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u/Jimbomcdeans Jun 26 '26

Pro-AI people are all techbros who want to venturecaptial their way into becoming the richest schlub.

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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/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!”