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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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This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the "I wish I could do ____. but _____" ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer "a thing". This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We're at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.
I don't know about other industries, but I'm a programmer, and I firmly believe that people who cannot be bothered to put in the hours to learn to do so the old fashioned way, should not make software.
Vibe coding is how you get software designed by people who do not know how to design software and implemented by a chatbot that is infamous for writing buggy, insecure, impossible-to-maintain code.
Software developers will always be needed, at least to make sure the vibe code didn't make a logic error that will cause the elevator to crash when someone pushes the wrong series of floor buttons, etc. However its making a lot more coding equivalent to an Excel Macro, where an end-user can do it without a pro developer being involved. Things like JSONs for AIs or basic python apps. It might even lure some of those people into learning a little about the language.