You can't pay me to prompt

I do hope you comment the same thing on the pro-AI articles from people trying to sell you a product. Internet is now infested by those, and without these articles you might think everybody has collectively lost their mind and still think we will get replaced in the next 6 months.

I use AI, what I'm tired of is shills and post-apocalyptic prophets

  Whilst I abstain from AI usage, I will continue to work with clients and colleagues who choose to use AI themselves. Where necessary I will integrate AI output given by others on the agreement that I am not held accountable for the combined work.

  I’d say [Declan] Chidlow verges towards AI apologism in places but overall writes a rational piece. [2] My key takeaway is to avoid hostility towards individuals†. I don’t believe I’ve ever crossed that line, except the time I attacked you [3] for ruining the web.
  
  † I reserve the right to “punch up” and call individuals like Sam Altman a grifter in clown’s garb.

I find some of it interesting. I'm very interested in understanding why others' experience of using genAI is so vastly different to my own.

(For me it's been as transformational a change as discovering I could do my high school homework on a word processor in the 90s when what I suspect was undiagnosed dyspraxia made writing large volumes of text by hand very painful).

I'm also interested in understanding if the envisaged transformation of developers into orchestrators, supervisors, tastemakers and curators is realistic, desirable or possible. And if that is even the correct mental model.

I'm not, I'm tired of hearing about it. If someone is forcing you to read these articles then that sounds like you are in a really shitty situation. Blink twice if you need help.

My CEO sent a company-wide email this week saying "AI use is mandatory for all developers". Until this kind of mandatory bullshit stops I'm happy to see other people fighting the good fight and publicly saying that they want to keep doing a job they actually enjoy.

Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.

I am not tired by this anti-AI stuff. As a person who uses it in very limited capacity, also as an ML/computer vision developer and researcher with 10 years of commercial experience with it, I want much more anti AI stuff.

Low quality (low precision) news, code, marketing, diagnosis, articles, books, food, entertainment (shorts, tik-tok), engineering is in my opinion the biggest problem in XXI century so far.

Low quality AI usage decisions, low quality AI marketing, retraining, placement, investments are accelerating the worst trends even more. It's like Soviet nuclear trains - just because nuclear is powerful and real it doesn't mean most of it's applications made any sense.

So as a pro-AI person and AI-builder in general, I want more anti-AI-slop content, more pro-discipline opinions.

We're in this in-between phase where we gradually all start to use AI. There is no escaping.

Very tired

You deliberately read an article entitled “You can’t pay me to prompt” then complained about having to hear about anti-AI blog posts?

Aren't we all tired by this pro-AI stuff? Use it if you wanna ruin the planet. Don't use it if you care about maintaining skill.

I just don't really wanna hear about your pro-AI peddling anymore.

> Aren't we all tired of this anti-AI stuff?

Let's do a quick analysis of the amount of money put forth to push AI:

> OpenAI has raised a total of $57.9B over 9 funding rounds

> Groq has raised a total of $1.75 billion as of September, 2025

Well, we could go on, but I think that's probably a good enough start.

I looked into it, but I wasn't able to find information on funding rounds that David Bushell had undergone for his anti-AI agenda. So I would assume that he didn't get paid for it, so I guess it's about $0.

Meanwhile:

- My mobile phone keyboard has "AI"

- Gmail has "AI". Google docs has "AI". At one point every app was becoming a chat app, then a TikTok clone. Now every app is a ChatGPT or Gemini frontend.

- I'm using a fork of Firefox that removes most of the junk, and there's still some "AI" in the form of Link Preview summaries.

- Windows has "AI". Notepad has "AI". MS Paint has "AI".

- GitHub stuck an AI button in place of where the notifications button was, then, presumably after being called every single slur imaginable about 50000 times per day, moved it thirty or so pixels over and added about six more AI buttons to the UI. They have a mildly useful AI code review feature, but it's surprisingly half-baked considering how heavily it is marketed. And I'm not even talking about the actual models being limited, the integration itself is lame. I still consider it mildly useful for catching typos, but that is not with several billion dollars of investment.

- Sometimes when I log into Hacker News, more than half of the posts are about AI. Sometimes you get bored of it, so you start trying to look at entries that are not overtly about AI, but find that most of those are actually also about AI, and if not specifically about AI, goes on a 20 minute tangent about AI at some point.

- Every day every chat every TV program every person online has been talking about AI this AI that for literally the past couple of years. Literally.

- I find a new open source project. Looks good at first. Start to get excited. Dig deeper, things start to look "off". It's not as mature or finished as it looks. The README has a "Directory Structure" listing for some odd reason. There's a diagram of the architecture in a fixed width font, but the whitespace is misaligned on some lines. There's comments in the code that reference things like "but the user requested..." as if, the code wasn't written by the user. Because it wasn't, and worse, it wasn't read by them either. They posted it as if they wrote it making no mention at all that it was prompts they didn't read, wasting everyone's time with half-baked crapware.

And you're tired of anti-AI sentiment? Well God damn, allow me to Stable Diffusion generate the world's smallest violin and synthesize a song to play on it using OpenAI Jukebox.

I'm not really strictly against AI entirely, but it is the most overhyped technology in human history.

I’m actually more sick of hearing about AI like literally all the time in all forms of media. I’m also sick of seeing AI created content which is so obviously low quality and often unchecked and just thrown out into the world.

Also when I hear another human suggest using AI for ____, my perception of them is that they are an unserious person.

So in my opinion AI has had a net negative effect on the world so far. Reading through this persons AI policy resonates with me. It tells me they are a thoughtful individual who cares about their work and the broader implications of using AI.

> Aren't we all tired by this anti-AI stuff?

It's fine to be tired of this. What is not fine is pretending your beliefs/feelings represent everybody else's.

No one forcing you to read the article. He is as free to write what he wants as you are to complain about it. Balanced. Like all things should be.

Nah im tired about AI dominating 90% of the posts and the slop machine. People who use AI can't shut up about it.

> I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.

And I don't want to hear about how the world of software engineering has been revolutionized because you always hated programming with a passion, but can now instead pay $200 to have Claude bring your groundbreaking B2B SaaS Todo app idea to life, yet that's basically all I hear about in any tech discussion space.

You should ask your AI assistant to explain to you why people would go out of their way to take a stand against this.

Not long before (or it's already happening) LLMs start training on stuff they wrote previously and it becomes the largest echo chamber the internet has ever seen.

Counterpoint: Swearing off AI doesn't ipso facto make you a good developer, and there are plenty of skilled people who can innovate and use AI at the same time.

AI will beat humans at all tasks that are not subjective (such as a landing page being pretty), but instead can be determined to be correct or not (does an endpoint return the correct data? how fast?)

Just like a chess engine beats any human.

People think LLMs are still at the point of programming based on what they learned from the data they scraped. We're well past that. We're at the point of heavy reinforcement learning. LLMs will train on billions of LoC of synthetic code they generate, like chess engines train on self-play games.

To be fair, hero banners lower bounce rates. Nobody would waste the time if it didn't work.

Sure if all you're doing is making it just vomit code then yes.

But there's way more LLMs can do, like assist you in connecting dots in complex codebases, find patterns to refactor given some rules, provide ideas, allow you to dig in dependencies to find apis that are undocumented or edge cases that are subtle to find, find information that you might've had to dig up by endless google queries and hard to find GitHub issues, provide support in technologies you have sometimes to use (sed, awk, regexes, Google sheets apis, etc) but you just don't care enough to learn because it happens to use them few times an year allowing you to focus on what matters, etc, etc.

I'm frankly tired of those pointless debates conflating LLMs in the context of code just for the same boring arguments of people hating on vibecoding or thinking every developer is delegating everything to AI and pushing slop. If that's your colleagues fire them. They are indeed useless and can be replaced by a prompt.

If one cannot see the infinite uses of LLMs even just for supporting, without ever authoring a single line of code or never ever touching a file, it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity.

Seriously, this is beyond tiring.

I think that a large percentage of programmers hate to read other people's code, and that's where the aversion comes from.

It's much more fun to write code than to review code.

They're saying that if they completely refused to touch any system that has been touched by AI, they would be unable to find paying work.

Thus, they won't use it directly themselves, but are willing to work with people who do.

The endless prattle about "you must embrace AI now or be locked out forever" is much more tiresome. If AI is really going to be so ubiquitous (and also replace all current skill categories), then I can just wait a year or two for AI to improve and go learn it then, right?

AFAICT, it comes down to people who enjoy the outcome vs people who enjoy the craft. Some people just love programming, and it doesn't matter what they're coding, making little virtual machines gives them joy. You (and I) are more outcome driven.

The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. Should the goal of dancing be to get it over with as quickly as possible too? Should the ideal piece of music you play be a single crashing chord so you can get done with playing the piano? To me these are direct analogues.

Sure, there are some boring rote parts of coding, just like sawing boards might not be the most enjoyable part of woodworking. I guess you could use AI as the analog of power tools (would that be using AI to generate awk and jq command lines?). But I wouldn't want to use a CNC router and take all the fun and skill out of the craft, nor do I find agentic AI enjoyable.

And AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do) or with company internal frameworks.

I’m not anti-AI but it isn’t part of my workflow. You’re describing yourself as someone unable to achieve your ideas without AI. That’s fine. But there are many people who have spent years building the skills necessary to be able to realize all of their ideas, and that their ideas are inextricably linked to the process. I wouldn’t have the ideas I have today if I didn’t spend years of my life in my editor. I could defer to Claude code for all my work, and I’d be frozen in time, never to progress again, losing everything that makes my work my work.

Perhaps something will change, but right now, Claude code does not change anything for me. If what I do is ancient and quaint, so be it. I’m not competing for who can churn out the most code, never have, never will, because that’s not what software development is about.

> I just can’t get my head around why a developer wouldn’t want to use AI assisted programming.

Because it doesn't work in a useful way.

With a pricing page[0] for a badge? ...a badge that acts as good indicator for AI web crawlers to prioritize such websites?

[0]: https://notbyai.fyi/pricing