Artificial Intelligence.

2026-02-16 · … views

Let’s start at the start

Before you is a small boy. Around the age of 15. He is sitting infront of a laptop looking at a tutorial on how to make a calculator in Visual Basic. He switches back to his code editor to type in what the tutorial said. He might not know it yet, but he will become very familiar with the words on his screen.

Now, the boy is 17 years old. He is worried about turning 18 because that means that he will have to start doing adult things like, getting insurance and doing taxes. He also is about to graduate from school and is made to go to a exploration day for a trade school. He already knows what he wants to do, so he chooses to study “Application & Media Development” which is a fancy way of saying software development + web.

The boy gets into a bit of a depressive spiral and ends up taking a year extra to complete her degree, but she passes all the tests and exams with flying colors.

Now after a month or two, she enters the job market and lands a junior developer position at a post-startup employer. There she works, and works for a couple years until COVID hits. She ends up contacting it 3 times over the course of 2-3 years. Then a small company called OpenAI releases a new model, GPT3. And everyone seems to be very crazy about it.

ok?

Hype starts to build around this “AI” thing, and she had heard of this before, she even played around with it a year or two earlier by taking her tweets and feeding them to a tensorflow script to get a bot that would talk utter nonsense, it was a fun party trick she though at that time.

OpenAI knows they have something special that might be very profitable so they get a lot of investor money and keep working on new models, GPT3.5 comes along, their API becomes available. Hype starts building, normies get sold on a magic black box that’ll automate their lives. GPT 4 and 4o come along, tool calling gets introduced, Cursor, CoPilot (Not the windows one, thanks microsoft) and other AI Agents get announced and now the girls employer catches on.

She gets a subscription to copilot and ChatGPT, she is expected to use them to “make her work faster and remove the boring parts of work”. At first, she is excited about the technology and thinks of all the real world applications this could have. but slowly she starts to lose interest in her work, her hobby projects slow down to a grinding halt and she feels lost again.

Now the business wants to integrate AI into it’s product, so she is tasked to build a connection with the OpenAI API to be able to generate data for clients. Later she would be tasked to expand this to be able to vectorize client files so they can “chat with their data”. At this point her feelings on the technology have watered down significantly. It went from this cool tool for specific tasks to this buzzword that is being implemented everywhere with no real vision. She also knows how much of a bubble the companies operating this tech are now, since they’re running on venture capital and fumes, Additionally the whole “where does the training data come from” thing does not sit right with her. No entity should be allowed to steal the work of humanity for profit.

Cope. Seethe. Mald.

So she starts coping. She believes these problems can be solved, she wishes that she can work with this thing to make cool things again. Her work switches from ChatGPT to Claude. Yeah Claude Code works way better. She tells herself that she will still be better than most other developers, especially vibe coders because well, she knows the underlying principles and data structures, she knows how to talk to the agent and scope questions so the AI doesn’t go overboard. But it all doesn’t matter anymore really. The “Tedious” parts of making something, the lack of being able to consciously claim you made it all by yourself. The “Reward” is gone, probably forever. Cause why spend a week of time making something your proud of when you can get it done in a day. She feels like her potential is gone, she feels like she was so good at what she liked doing just a few years ago but now that flame that supported it is just, not there. She can’t stop using the shitty ai agent at work, and she doesn’t know what to really do without it anymore anway. She used to say that software development didn’t have the same problems as the artists because software had always had a core of sharing solutions. But… Reallistically? That’s not really true at all. She wants to apologize to the artists she told that she didn’t have the same problem, she told them it was okay to vibe-code things to just get results but… She now realizes that’s been her coping mechanism. Pretending it’s fine, pretending that it’s actually not that bad. Pretending she’s okay with it.

It’s hard to not pretend when faced with the possibility that whatever you’ve been doing for the majority of your conscious life suddenly feels like it has become obsolete. It’s hard to not make up excuses when you tie your self worth to your accomplishments and whatever those around you think about you.

It’s hard to not feel useless when a 90$ subscription can do 90% of what you’ve invested most of your life into.

I Still believe that this technology has the possibility to be applied in a good way, tailor made models for specific applications have been made and used efficiently, General purpose models just are too big, they cannot run on our own devices and require whole datacenters just to function. I don’t believe that these general purpose models will stick around for a long time. So it’ll be interesting to watch as the bubble bursts and what remains in the aftermath.

Maybe I need to just quit and figure out something else to do, maybe I’ll never find anything. Maybe I will. Cause this arrangement is not working.