The Thousands Lines of AI

> Thought for quite some time

I read between the lines of AI, AGI, super-intelligence, capital investment, and greed tech companies profiting off of human created content.

Many things can be true at the same time. But I see AI producing code. A lot of it. A powerful magic wand that does exactly what you tell it to do. More or less.

More code is useful if it solve a problem, worth solving and doing so in an efficient and safe way. But like the reader in the previous sentence, many people in the industry got lost in all this information. Unable to process, reflect, and understand. Like captured by butterfly dust in the air, we got charmed by these whims of intelligence from machines we do not fully understand. Unpredictable in mood (aren’t we all?).

Developers producing code, opening new chats over and over. Writing, reviewing and the editing tons of code. Chats over chats. Even when we let an agent roam free in the codebase, eventually they will want to chat with us. And we should chat with these agents if we let them free to change the codebase; we should check in with them.

How much can we trust these changes? In the end it all depends if you have a fast and reliable validation step that provides a feedback loop to control the amount and quality of the code changes. A system that has an ability to self evaluate and self correct. It was hard before. Now the pace picked up and the

But we get lost in these lines of AI. Either through code generation or agentic automation. It all brutally, quickly and sadly too often boils down to increase productivity and efficiency. Less costs and more money for the shareholders.

I can’t believe the claims of AI making the world, people and economy better when they come from the same companies that used it to justify layoffs which covered poor growth management and a short sighted cost cutting strategies. It is easy to get excited in software development now that we have these powerful tools but the moment I remove my programmer’s hat I see an industry poisoned by grift, ignorance, and lack of respect for people. These new possibilities makes the engineer in me excited but I can’t jump on the excitement train because code doesn’t live in isolation. It has to solve real problems.

Looking at tech executives, politicians and investors driving this movement I fear they are building castles in the air.

Illusions of progress.