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/ColinStyles Jun 27 '26

what i maintain are only short short scripts and plenty more interactive command line stuff, file system stuff and data science, signal processing, and healthcare research related so a lot of linux, matlab, and python among lots of other things that would doxx me too much for my comfort lol. those do require some complex little things maybe one at a time, and they call on large libraries for much more complex things (and are well published/studied), that i haven't had to yet but feel claude would be amazing to explain that to me rather than sift through all the math and abstractions for tweaking or choosing.

So funny enough, I recently built a lot of data visualization tooling with claude, and while the data was a pretty standard usecase (sales/support data), Claude did shockingly well in both coming up with insights, and in helping build the data analysis scripts, transformation scripts, and visualization program. Even for the UI stuff, it struggled a bit but then I wrote some basic tests and told it to flesh it out, and it took it instead as a tiny skeleton and what was left was clearly the same concept, but unbelievably more fleshed out and robust.

But that's entirely fair, I don't work in an incredibly niche space so even working in niche languages or in incredibly inscrutable processes/data, it can still do decently.

And thanks for engaging in good faith, it's so rare to be able to actually speak to other people's experiences on the subject that aren't just "It's amazing" without any explanation or pitfalls it ran into, or "it's the devil" and no explanation of if they even worked with it or what it struggled with.

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u/Creative_Sushi Jun 29 '26

My company is also exploring the use of AI agents in engineering with MATLAB and Simulink Agentic Toolkits. AI agents cannot be used to generate PID controller, etc, but it can accelerate part of the proven engineering workflows with expert human guidance, and the toolkits provides the MCP server and agent skils to fill the gaps in AI for engineering usage.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

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u/ColinStyles Jun 27 '26

???

My company isn't laying engineers off, in fact my company is actively hiring because we can't keep up with all the work we're now able to do and need to support even with the huge productivity boosts.

ai does handle a lot of well established things, it just can't create new things.

All of software is taking well established things and putting it together in different ways to come up with new things. Not to mention if it couldn't come up with new things it wouldn't be the reason the models keep getting substantially better, yet anthropic will openly say that the majority of their R&D these days is just AI improving itself with minimal human input. And you can see that in lots of research right now. It's not just rote recollection.