483
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Technology
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I think you're right in general. I think juniors and those who havent yet had experience are not going to understand a goddamn thing and produce broken, insecure, unmaintainable slop.
I've written my share of garbage code -- completely by hand! And i'm much better for it.
Once you have that experience, once you've written a few backends and frontends, there's not much left to understand. Move the data from here to there. Display it, transform it, slice it up. For webdev AI is a huge force multiplier. I can make a dozen features or apps in the time it used to take me to learn one framework I was curious about. It even helps me learn faster because of how quickly I can test new patterns and ideas.
There's certainly a right way to use it if you want to continue being edified, burning the planet down aside.
If we only used AI for codegen, this probably wouldn’t be much of an issue. Those cat videos take more energy than building a complete app. Also, it’s all pretty new and the newest tech 40 years ago would have filled a warehouse and had the computational power of a potato, but here we are now. I expect we’ll get more efficient at it and in the ways we use it. And there’s already a huge worldwide shift in energy capture (America aside…)
Whenever I look back at old code, mine or others, the first words that usually come to mind are "what you have to understand about this is... we were on a tight schedule, we never thought this was going to be used in production, we weren't allowed to execute the planned and contracted refactor... etc. etc. etc."