The AI Madness

Rant Writing

I have to rant about the AI mad dash, especially at my place of employment and likely at other places too.

Leadership at our company is reasonable in the capitalistic sense. They optimize for financial gains and disregard human well being (work from the office policy that deserves whole own post). They try to make informed decisions to a varying degree of success but every now and then they catch a Silicon Valley fewer of a cool new tech.

Couple of years back, the next big thing was a bitcoin. I haven’t been with the company at that time but still stumble upon the remains in the code ever so often. And because compared to us - mere mortals - the leadership doesn’t believe in the value of retrospective and learning from past mistakes, the whole bitcoin saga is repeating, except with AI.

The theme of our hack week? AI. Part of our one-sentence goal for 2025? Leverage AI. Theme of the next global all hands? Learnings from last year, new product features, and celebration of successes… who am I kidding, AI.

I don’t rely on AI for writing, the quality isn’t there. Nor do I use copilot or any other code assistant. Occasionally, I ask Chat GPT for a bash script or a hacky code that solves a particular problem that’s outside my expertise and would take me a solid few minutes of googling and reading docs before I even get to writing. There are horses for courses, and AI is helpful for many tasks, from text summaries to quick solutions. Nevertheless, these nuances seem hard to grasp for decision makers at our company and what we have instead, is a migration from Confluence to Notion (“because it has AI”).

The mad AI dash is saddening insight into the whimsy understanding of lower echelons of the company by the C level. From the over the top glorification to the out of touch expectations of its capabilities. We took a technology with a couple of justifiable use-cases and turned it into a solve-it-all wishy-washy machine. No specific plans, no objectives, no metrics. Only a licked finger, stuck into the air, to see where the wind from other companies blows. We made it a solution looking for a problem, while there’s thousands of other problems to solve.

Please, stop shoving AI down our throat, nobody asked for it, and shoving things down our throat certainly violates our code of conduct. The next time I hear “You should use more AI” I am done, man. Let me do my job, let the hands-on experts decide which solution is the best, and if you still wish to throw in AI during the next investor meeting, please find a proper use case first.


No LLM was used while writing this post.