What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write.
Given all the bullshit I have to wade through, I'm not looking forward to the slop and misinformation that I'm sure is coming.
Even developers can get ensnared by poor code generated by the tools. Someone who is not nearly familiar with all the syntax, performance and security pitfalls would stand no chance.
For a senior UX designer to become a senior-level coder is like asking a master chef to also be a master plumber because “they both work in the kitchen.” You might get the water running, but you won’t know why the pipes are rattling.
Once a model is available on your device, per the specification, any website you visit will be able to send prompts to that model without requesting permission to do so, then do whatever it wants with the responses. And again, Gemini Nano is on your device if you’re using Chrome, and it will be again if you remove it, unless you start tearing out wires in ways that the average user of the web can’t. So, in short: you now have an LLM running on your machine, and any website you visit can make use of it, and whatever processing resources it requires. Google — a company that has paid billions of dollars in settlements for lawsuits related to privacy violations and deceptive practices in data collection — has said not to worry about it.
Add another reason to avoid Google Chrome like the plague. If you value your privacy at all, I’d highly suggest never using Chrome, and if possible, remove it from your computer all together. It will provide another easy way to fingerprint you.
There’s also the question of what the browser is even for. A browser is a user agent – it’s supposed to act on behalf of the user, not the vendor. Silently downloading 4 GB of AI model to your machine, re-downloading it if you remove it, and then letting any website access it without your permission – that’s Chrome acting as Google’s agent, not yours. And it’s hard not to notice how many Google products stand to benefit from having an LLM pre-installed on every Chrome user’s machine. With opt-out, of course.
Ugh...
What makes this particular instance so frustrating is that the contrast is right there in front of us, in the same set of release notes. There’s lazy loading for audio and video: carefully proposed, properly standardized, welcomed by all implementers. A true gift to the web community. And then, there’s the Prompt API: rammed through despite broad opposition. One feature shows how the standards process can and should work. The other shows what happens when a company with dominant browser market share decides that the process doesn’t apply to them.
You don’t just switch the lights back on for these things after Trump is gone and expect to find everything just as it was. From NIH, FDA, SAMHSA, CMS, and CDC, to NSF, NOAA, EPA, and NASA, the harm is so significant that massive amounts of resources will be needed just to bring us back to baseline, let alone prepare ourselves for the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.
Make America Scientific Again?
None of this is to say public health and scientific research in the US were perfect before Trump took power again. But that’s also the point: Recovering from the devastation gives us the chance to build the system we’ve needed for so long. Yet confronting the sheer scale of what needs to happen is the first step toward recovery.
I am sympathetic to the view that space exploration is a luxury. I don't disagree, even. But NASA's budget is not the reason gas costs $6 a gallon, or why we don't have universal healthcare or pre-K. We don't have those because those in charge, and the people who voted for them, have chosen for us not to have those. It is a false binary that we even have to choose at all. The U.S. is the richest polity that has ever existed; there is more than enough money to go around to satisfy basic human services while still funding spaceflight. The people denying us those basic services would very much like for you to identify NASA as the culprit for its $24.4 billion budget, which represents 0.35 percent of all government spending, at the same time a pointless and purposeless war costs us a billion dollars a day, and the government seeks a $1.5 trillion defense budget.
And look at all of what NASA is able to accomplish with that little bit of the federal budget.
It was an extraordinarily human moment. Humanity feels a little more tangible when surrounded by nothing but machines and darkness; Wiseman's is a soft beating heart in a big black void that has carried everything, even its grief, farther than any heart has ever been. And now when he and his daughters look up to the Moon, he'll be able to point to Carroll Wiseman's memorial. When we explore, we bring our humanity with us, and leave it wherever we go.
In some ways I feel like a carpenter whose job is now to write the blueprints for the IKEA factory. Of course there is still artistry in designing the blueprints, but you don’t care if the factory spits out one or two tables with splinters in the legs. The point is to produce enough furniture fast enough that the little imperfections don’t matter. Taste and judgment still count, but they’re at the level of the overseer on the assembly line, not the master carpenter working a chisel.
One worry I have for my entire generation of programmers is that many of us have been getting our artistic “fix” from coding: taking craftsmanship seriously, reviewing others’ code with the eye of a literary critic, trying to elevate the profession. Now the profession has been turned into an assembly line, and many of us are eagerly jumping into our new jobs as blueprint-designers without questioning what this will do to our souls. I believe art is necessary for a rich and full human life, so this isn’t an idle concern.
Everything has trade-offs, a set of attributes optimized and balanced towards a particular outcome.
You get X, but you lose Y.
Life is full of trade-offs. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Unlike technical debt, which announces itself through mounting friction - slow builds, tangled dependencies, the creeping dread every time you touch that one module - comprehension debt breeds false confidence. The codebase looks clean. The tests are green. The reckoning arrives quietly, usually at the worst possible moment.
Margaret-Anne Storey’s describes a student team that hit this wall in week seven: they could no longer make simple changes without breaking something unexpected. The real problem wasn’t messy code. It was that no one on the team could explain why design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The theory of the system had evaporated.
Knowing the code you are introducing to your codebase is so important. As soon as you offload that blindly to AI, the timebomb starts ticking.
I read one engineer say that the bottleneck has always been a competent developer understanding the project. AI doesn’t change that constraint. It creates the illusion you’ve escaped it.
And the inversion is sharper than it looks. When code was expensive to produce, senior engineers could review faster than junior engineers could write. AI flips this: a junior engineer can now generate code faster than a senior engineer can critically audit it. The rate-limiting factor that kept review meaningful has been removed. What used to be a quality gate is now a throughput problem.
The nightmare is when the AIs create such large PRs that make it so easy to miss wrong turns in code.
There’s also a specific failure mode worth naming. When an AI changes implementation behavior and updates hundreds of test cases to match the new behavior, the question shifts from “is this code correct?” to “were all those test changes necessary, and do I have enough coverage to catch what I’m not thinking about?” Tests cannot answer that question. Only comprehension can.
The tests pass...the code must work...right? Right?
You will pay for comprehension sooner or later. The debt accrues interest rapidly.
People, the context-bearers, have experience and capabilities that machines might never understand encoded in our muscles and memory. I’m on record saying I despise nuance –and I do– but it’s more important than ever to be able to connect to our fellow humans over this nuance so our world is not paved over by contextless opinions from ill-informed robots. Empower and believe people over machines.
Let me try to define the Good Web. The Good Web is any part of the internet built in good faith, which I mean in the specific, contractual sense. The maker is not optimizing against the user. No dark patterns. No retention schemes. No bloated scripts designed to keep you scrolling past the point of nourishment into the territory of compulsion. Nobody on a bbCode forum is selling your reading habits to an insurance company. The Good Web is not a technology, not a protocol, not even a community—though it contains all of those things. It's a disposition toward the person on the other end of the connection. It's the difference between a neighbour who bakes you bread and a supermarket that puts the bread at the back of the store because they know you'll buy chips on the way. Both are offering you something. Only one of them gives a shit whether you leave full.
More of this please.
You simply cannot breathe without seeing, hearing, or engaging in any kind of technical conversation about AI. AI has dominated the Zeitgeist so catastrophically that the only way to escape is to turn off the WiFi and delete all the apps. Every single piece of fucking software has some kind of shitty AI add-on, forced into your face at regular intervals whilst you’re trying to go about your life or do your job or check your email or write an email or read an email or talk to a human support agent or read a recipe or open an issue on an open-source project or watch a YouTube video or open your IDE or do a fucking internet search. The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.
It's all opt-out (if you're lucky enough to be able to turn it off) too.
What’s even more personally terrifying: what if I need to find a new job in the near future? There are seemingly no non-generative-AI-centred options left for someone like me. I’m afraid that every opportunity will either be for a company building some kind of generative AI experience, or one that mandates the use of generative AI in your daily responsibilities, or one that refuses to use AI at the expense of their financial success and the stability of my employment. At this point I cannot escape. I am at the mercy of the profession I chose. I have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. Retraining is not an option right now. I must force myself to adapt.