My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
I’ve started to call people AI-assisted
Even before computers I didn’t need, nor want, anyone’s help. Especially if it was forced upon me. A human’s independent spirit will always shun AI. Everyone else just wants you to pay a monthly “AI” subscription.
I used AI at work this week and it was so consistently incorrect that I dropped it
May I ask what the use case was?
What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don’t do that, we don’t want them or their “agents.”
For fuck’s sake.
I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as “AI”. I think it’s fairly useful now, and suspect we’re at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.
What I don’t like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo’s front end, which anonymizes prompts.
As for agents, it’s pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I’m confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.
To be clear, “normal” people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won’t shut up about them.
Yeah this is the deal. I’m a Gen x er and I use Gemini for some tasks - I want a quick id of a component or reference some knowledge chunk to verify something. I have absolutely no use for an agent.
Not only do we not care about it, we actively hate it.
Are we considered “normal people” though?
Quite a few of the people I know and consider “normal” openly dislike AI.
I’m not sure it’s a majority opinion buts it’s not an obscure one.
I have agents force fed to me at work. I’ve already got my own honed workflows I’ve refined over the years; now, Outlook and Teams and Various agentic frameworks are spamming me with summaries of stuff I either already know or don’t need to know… except they still get it wrong constantly, so I can’t trust what they think I should prioritize (usually it’s work I’ve already assigned to others).
Claude Code agents are decent, but they need to create discrete work objects that can be properly reviewed, so act like junior coders.
The main issue I have with most agents today is that they try to replace MY work, making it more complicated and time consuming, instead of completing the work I can’t bother to do myself. And in order to do those things effectively, I have to loosen my privacy and security models to the point where they effectively don’t exist. Which I’d never do for another human, so why should I do it for an agent that’s more likely to catastrophically screw things up at record speed?
