It’s both. Plenty of people have been laid off in hopes of replacing them with AI slaves
If there’s anything I’ve learned during my time in corporate America it’s that ideas don’t need to be plausible, rational, or well planned to be implemented.
And they will be as long as investors buy into the buzzword hype
yup and now many of those places are realizing “oh fuck…”
My client base for the past year has been those “oh fuck…” moments. “Hey our app that we built with a junior dev and Claude Code isn’t really working and we really don’t have anyone available to see why, can you come in for a consultation and review the code?”
“sure thing client, I"m going to nickle and dime you for this but sure i’ll code review it” I then proceed to tell them how fucked they are, how much money they DIDN’T save, and how much it’s going to cost them to start over. not fix it, you don’t fix this slop, you have to start from scratch.
It’s the same song and dance for these places. They get a license from anthropic, keep a couple junior devs on board to be vibe coders/prompt monkies and then axe the rest. And always a few months to a year or so down the road they realize they fucked up and how much money they DIDN’T end up saving. Then they hire people like me to come in and clean up the slop and then in turn end up having to look for actual devs. then once people realize they’re hiring they get absolutely blitzkrieged with resumes (many of which are AI written and fake themselves) thus costing them even MORE time and money to deal with. Then they hope they can find a REAL developer in time (which they never do) and then their investors get pissed and eventually they end up getting fucked over. Not before I get my cheque though.
All these places think in the short term, think of immediate savings, but always it will come down to massive tech debt as a result of leveraging their LLM’s that WILL cost them a hell of alot more money in the long run.
This is the problem with many publicly traded companies, and even many private companies with similarly-minded investors. The incentives don’t encourage long-term growth and stability; they want immediate returns. I couldn’t count how many times I’ve seen bad short-term decisions that save money to meet a target right now but will cost far more in the future.
One time I made a camera system that would pass/fail sort stuff on an automated production line. As soon as I finished the first draft version of it, before I could even test it, management laid off six of the seven inspectors. Needless to say our production speed was absolutely crippled while the new hire replacements tried to get up to speed.
When I left two years later, the system still wasn’t operational because there was no objective fail threshold they could meet reliably, but that didn’t stop them from jumping the gun and firing inspectors every six months or so and slowing everything down.
I’m sure some asshole got a bonus each time.
Money going all the way to nvidia, the only company making money off of AI hype.
Just as crypto bubble burst.
Coincidence?
When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business.
CoreWeave is doing quite well, too.
My boss is wasting the company’s money
FTFY
This thumbnail image really reminds me of Hyperion. I cant say why without spoilers but I almost want to read all four books again now.
