Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.
to be fair, the plan would have worked if you had included the allotted number of goblins in the box in addition to the packing material.
Came across this today: the purpose of a system is what it does. Based on that I would say the purpose of Claude was to make mistakes and get my coworker fired.
Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to “sue” journalists by “summoning” them to a “tribunal” staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first “lawsuit”, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D’Souza
threw a hissy fithas shuttered everything “temporarily”.I don’t understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they’re mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal ‘social credit score’ for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D’Souza implies here:
One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)
but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That’s just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it’s staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.
Special mentions:
Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.
“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
Honestly, I think D’Souza explains the business best:
Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,” D’Souza says. “What I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually don’t want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’”
Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.
Twitter really broke their brains.
In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”
Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.
D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”
and wiped out several cities in the processMy profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”
did they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?
After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.
so it seems
(As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.)
it does fit a pattern
oh lol
“I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
I would pay to see a billionaire or CEO in tears over an article.
And if stopping them were that easy, why hasn’t it happened yet?
Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:
Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.
Literally the only pivot to AI that I am happy about. Molly is GOAT
Good timing since it seems even Crypto folks are getting out of Crypto.
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won’t be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.
Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.
Finally, a machine which makes it impossible to watch the movie batman and robin.
(Joke explainer: the batsuit had nipples).
3 weeks after the “as soon as Friday” news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure don’t sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):
We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.
May, likely, if… Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.
Edit: also Altman’s eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now
Don’t they have their CFO not even reporting directly to be CEO? I would bet that there’s a ton of internal dissent about timing and strategy of how to cash out.
That CFO thing was definitely the case, at least a few months ago. I’m sure you’re right about the internal chaos, even if that CFO drama has changed, and it would align with how non-committal this announcement is.
I would love to be a fly on that wall.
Wait why would they expect it to leak? (assuming that mentioning it isn’t just some marketing stunt, which it probably is)
Ed Zitron might have got hold of it, if his bsky is anything to go by.
We could be feasting soon!
They asked a chatbot and the chatbot is trained on shadowrun and cyberpunk2077 sourcebooks.
IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. That’s how I read OpenAI’s statement. But it’s not completely clear what “it” means in “we expect it to leak”.
Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they can’t fire or control directly.
But I’m also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned “as soon as Friday” articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.
Hard to tell how much of it is what, they’re toxic inside and out.
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what…
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
When Frontiers started automating the editorial process, I stayed. I reasoned that as long as the automation could be turned off, human editors can still ensure rigorous, high-quality peer review. This now became impossible - the system has been entirely hijacked by algorithms.
Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting “reviewers” with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.
I emailed and met with the editorial office to ask for the AI assistant to be turned off. I was told this is not possible. Instead, I was treated to some vague promises of potential future improvements and a dose of gaslighting.
If human editors can’t control who reviews science, it’s no longer peer review — it’s a rubber-stamp machine designed for volume and profit, not quality. I have no intention of attaching my name to it. So I’m out.
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Link for that development, in case anyone missed it:
https://awful.systems/post/8263538/11477939
I did, indeed, turn them down, and I told the journal why.
Sigh.
ACM will no longer require disclosure of the use of #generativeAI in writing papers… an absolutely terrible change by the @ACM Publications Board to the Policy on Authorship. Yes, this will give ACM more papers. No, the ideology of “number go up” productivism is not the path to responsible, ecological or ethical computing, but to irrelevance.
I signed up for ACM last year, just hit my expiry (like, today), and truly don’t know if I want to renew
it’s been an extreme avenue of generative hype, constantly pushing talks, books, etc. I have no idea how they square it with the ethical pledge
By not thinking about it, one presumes.
I was flipping through this month’s magazine on the bus, don’t worry, they have a solution for reviewers…
https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/
:(
To prevent fraud and rule exchanges, tokens can be implemented as a digital entity, representing a fungible unit of value. Tokens can be transferred through cryptographic protocols and governed by rules running in the TMS.
They’re gonna do it. Peer review is going ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Anything to avoid paying people for their time.
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like “saccharide” in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
Amazing stuff. LLM security is so cooked.
The first I heard of a project doing this was iocaine, an anti-scraper tool (that I think awful.systems uses??) which has module names like “sex_dungeon” and “GargleBargle” intended to make the codebase unmanageable to navigate for llm tooling. It’s pretty funny that this has become an established technique.
awful does indeed use iocaine! and yeah the codebase is fun :)
it’s stunningly effective at handling scrapers, and it’s even more fucked how intense a plague the scrapers (combined with running shitty job scheduling with even worse code through resproxies) are
ig chucking in a segment of merck index (short entries with compound properties, 2000 pages of) to iocaine training corpus would trip it
My favorite part of that whole beautiful affair was towards the end with dgerard’s Chinese counterpart saying “no don’t ban them yet I need more material for an article I’m halfway through writing.”
Gotta love it when people who try to cause problems for others run into the consequences of their actions and then try to make these consequences everyone else’s problem.
he should 10x his budget. what kind of startup gets bankrupt after 2k loss? maybe they’re just deterred and will try again later (which was implied)
What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?
I approve of this
New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they’ve blocked it for everyone.
They’re claiming they believe it’s because someone has managed to find a “minor” vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.
My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.
I question how robust Anthropic’s geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
I think it’s more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It’s an IPO race to the bottom.
It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
It also saves them on the cost of actually serving the model, and stalls the cycle of people gradually realizing the new model isn’t much better than the previous one.
Very fair point. I’m still inclined to think this wasn’t primarily a marketing decision, because I don’t think they would point the finger so directly at the government if that were the case. Perhaps the directive was a blessing in disguise for them though.
Either way, I think this is pretty telling for what we can expect over the next couple of months before we see any public SEC docs from either OpenAI or Anthropic. If it weren’t for the immense damage it will cause for innocent people, I might have broken out some popcorn. Popcorn might be my staple food for financial reasons soon anyway.
Yall sneer, but I made a couple of thousand bucks this saturday standing on a dark street corner selling illegal Fable and Mythic linkups. Gave the first question free to any boomers that came asking, to get them hooked.
Now seeing one-shotted Europeans calling for the development of AI/LLMs at home - “Mistral” is not adequate
Literally just started a discussion on European booster fanfic hype a few days ago: https://awful.systems/post/8591627/11736760
I wonder if Europe 2031 will get a boost out of this, it is really perfect timing for them, they can even claim an early prediction success on the US cutting Europe off! (But as with AI 2027, Europe 2031 assumes a much more competent US that can implement strategies like that in a competent fashion instead of some disorganized demands after 5pm on a Friday).
I’ve already seen “Europe 2031 was right. Shortest time between a work of science fiction and science fact” on LinkedIn… 🙃🙃🙃
Please enjoy this comment saying “Nate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writing” like that’s a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying one’s own writing process is bad.
AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So I’m totally fine with it proliferating on LW.
This all reads as a very elitist and privileged perspective.
Dude look where you’re commenting
I trust Nate Silver’s writing advice exactly as much as I trust his recommendations for hair-care products
weird, for people who write so many superfluous words i guessed that they at least like it
Gwern apparently hates slop for text but loves it for pictures.
i mean the process of writing, if they didn’t they would perhaps write in more concise way
J-R Conlin has left Mozilla after 15 years, and has some choice words for the company.
New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/
It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)
Some highlights in sneering:
The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.
One of the character’s is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.
Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.
This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to ‘most’ and not ‘all’ and swapped ‘cognitive tasks’ for ‘benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks’ and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.
Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.
This ‘scenario’ has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.
The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.
So I couldn’t a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the ‘planned’ American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.
Up to this point, everything we’ve said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.
They are even copying AI 2027’s stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!
Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.
Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is “Europe needs to copy America’s lack of labor laws or other regulations”. I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other ‘parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing’ or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.
But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.
So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?
Europe’s slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.
By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.
Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!
We are already a few years behind on the planned AI destroying the world
I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that’s the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can’t be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)
We can (and probably will) keep having AI bubbles as long as capitalism exists (and thus rich idiots with too much money are looking for ways to get richer) and there are new AI approaches/paradigms (with flashy demo-able potential) left to discover.
I love the deep lack of specificity in “other sectors of the economy facing shortages”. Either you have to acknowledge that you’re talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren’t so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker’s chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you’re making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it’s often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.
Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition
They do this with everything, because the tech doesnt hold up to the dreams, a lot of things get diluted. Esp noticably when they compared llms to humans learning and instead of noting llm advancements they talked down how humans learned.
See also the fields reaction to the chinese room thought experiment.
Are you worried about AI taking over the world and killing everyone? Fear not, the people who can stop it are collecting hats. Surely everything is under control.
Olay but this is good though. This is the kind of autism Lesswrong should focus more on. No bullshit, just the facts.
owning us with hats and logic
Oddly this reminds me of a weird thing. (Not trying to attack you or others here btw, for reasons that I will make clear in the end). When I was active in student activism, I recalled how annoyed our leaders of the group were that a small but vocal (and inactive) part of the organisations membership didnt allow the leaders to be people.
When they (after already working crazy hours btw, these people were committed), spend some time in the evening to wind down and make some sort of joke(*), the inactive members alway would start to send angry emails. 'how dare you make an internal joke while students have less rights/the uni isnt eco friendly/etc". I though back on how that impulse from inside to org was indeed quite weird. Esp as the people complaining didnt seem to be that active members. (If they were they would know how much work was being done and the strain people were under and how the jokes were good for morale).
Something to take into account if you see lesswrong people react negatively to the hat post.
Of course none of this applies tonus as outsiders who do not take them that seriously at all. It is a weird thing to make a long post about indeed, esp with one of the hats being one of yuds it seems? Im wondering if this lesswrong thing is perhaps more of a personality cult that anything serious. A well at least nobody is using the org as a dating hunting ground, that would be bad.
*: basically they would spend their whole day prepping for meetings with the uni/other orgs, sending out emails trying to get the members to help out, doing research and summarizing that for the members etc etc, and at the end of the day they send one internal email about talk like a pirate day, and the next morning they get 21 replies to their work, 20 of those people being mad about the talk like a pirate email.
I haven’t experienced the situation you’re describing myself, but it feels very plausible.
Similarly, all developed societies depend on a number of people selflessly working in positions of elected or non-elected authority (local councils, HOAs, school boards) and treating them like people who cannot afford to make any mistakes is not a recipe for increased democratic engagement.
Anyway, so far no-one has commented, negatively or otherwise, and I think most LWers are treating it as harmless fun.
It’s not making me any more interested in coming more than 200 feet from any of these people, and neither is this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GtZKzWgAqWrE2tXrQ/contra-dance-at-lessonline, but maybe that’s just me being mean.
Isn’t that the hat from the picture that Yudkowsky showed off to prove he wasn’t a cult leader? Are they trying to beat the cult allegations by ha ha jokingly wearing the same silly clothes as their founder?
You would expect the leader of the ‘make sure the prompt doesnt turn us into paperclips’ movement to better right.
that’s just me being mean.
It prob is, stuff like this seems to be quite common at various nerdy events. Just harmless fun(*). So a removed eating crackers moment perhaps. I know I have those myself.
*: initially made a typo there and wrote ‘hatless fun’.
This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that it’ll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesn’t say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.
https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:
- For every code change merged, the probability of a production incident has more than tripled.
The incidents-to-PR ratio is up 242.7% as teams move from low to high AI adoption.
- Bugs are accelerating, not stabilizing.
In our 2025 AI engineering report on the AI Productivity Paradox, bugs per developer were up 9% as AI adoption grew. In this dataset, that figure has risen to 54%
- The most experienced people in your organization are being buried.
Median time to first PR review is up 156.6%. Average time spent in code review is up 199.6%. Median time in review is up 441.5%. The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did.
This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Merideth’s The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering you’d be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what I’ve been following I don’t know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then it’s only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.
Also the fact that the framing here doesn’t seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If you’re not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?
I think part of the issue is that historical software quality was an artefact of its time… if you can’t easily patch your released products, you need to work harder to ensure they’re functional. If the only way for people to learn about how your product works in the documentation you ship with it, the docs need to be useful and comprehensive.
The combination of software needing no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and the internet rendered those pressures obsolete. Ship shit, fix later. Mass-scale a/b testing over past decade or two shows that most people seemingly don’t care if their software runs like absolute garbage, and is covered in adverts, and harvests all their personal data and the leaks all of it that wasn’t sold.
An incident-to-pr ratio that’s up by 250% is unfortunate, but it is not yet so bad that the end-users actually care enough to do anything about it, even assuming they can do anything.
