I find my hatred of AI to be incredibly rational, and the cultlike veneration of the “insane productivity boost” it gives you to be truly irrational (whether or not that boost actually exists).

Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.

As a software engineer I am so deeply ashamed of how quick so many in the field have done a complete 180 on "productivity cannot be measured by lines of code" to wearing lines of code like a badge of honour.

It's similar to the hype around the "internet revolution", the "microservices revolution", all the "codeless" solutions over the decades...

Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.

Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).