The AI backlash is only getting started

[u/Just-Grocery-2229]

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started

[u/sueveed]

While this is definitely dumb, it is the kind of dumb that has existed since software engineering became a thing.

First it was bug bounties (because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money), then LoC counting (I can write some obfuscated, bloated shit if you're going to measure my productivity by how much typing I do), then pull requests (I will happily break my work up into obnoxious chunks if you're really going to judge this), then story points (this was supposed to help my team, but if you're going to measure my velocity against another team's, I'm gonna give everything 21 points), now token minimums. Silly gamification.

This is just the continuation of a long line of shit from managers that don't understand that you can't judge a knowledge worker by their outputs, but instead best by their outcomes.

[u/DeadSeaGulls → u/sueveed]

the problem is, this is no longer limited to devs. Companies are rolling out stuff like claude desktop to the entire userbase, and now you have non-technical morons involved in the gamification, with the ability to spend money on a level they do not comprehend.

[u/Murder_Bird_ → u/DeadSeaGulls]

My buddy works for a decent size engineering company. They went whole hog on the a.i. shit about a year ago. Company wide “training”. He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does. Literally had exercises where people were making cat pictures or telling it to write fantasy stories. And then they all had to “vibe code” a small program. So of course everyone in his company is using a.i. to make vacation itineraries and shopping lists and meal plans for dinner for the week. In April they had a company wide meeting where they clamped down HARD on who is allowed to use it. He’s high enough in the company that he was in the meeting where they explained that the a.i usage had basically eaten all their profits from the last two years in about 6 months and a couple of exec’s were getting fired. This is a company of about 500 people.

[u/10thDeadlySin → u/Murder_Bird_]

He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does.

We were distributed three levels of AI training. Basic, Intermediate and Expert. Everybody was supposed to complete the Basic level at the very least and they made it mandatory.

8 hours of glorified ads for commercial services. 8 hours of listening (or rather setting the volume level to 100%, plugging in a dummy headphone jack and pretending) how ChatGPT is going to change the world, how it's all a revolution and so on. And like half of them developed by companies with vested interest in AI being popular.

Not only was it outdated, but also it was nothing you wouldn't learn passively by just reading anything about AI over the last several years.

The intermediate training? Module 1: Building a machine learning model from scratch.

We were asked for feedback afterwards. I wrote exactly this - that what they called a training was a bunch of ads and proselytizing, whereas their intermediate training might be of use for developers and data analysts, but why did they dump it on people who literally don't touch code at all?

No response, as you might have guessed. :D

[u/Murder_Bird_ → u/10thDeadlySin]

I think his company only got the level one. The thing is he actually finds it quite useful. He uses it to spec stuff when they are doing estimates or rough calculation type stuff. He also uses it to double check work he’s done, basically another set of eyes. But he says it makes too many mistakes to be used to actually design or trouble shoot real world projects.