Yes, people can be bad at their jobs. Yes, they can work in an industry and not know anything about the market but I refuse to believe that most people in most companies are just stumbling around faking it. I've never worked in a place like that. People like this exist but there are only a handful of people like this at every job.

The hyperbole feels like it's been contrived to fit into the classic AI counterpoint: But humans do this too!

It's more nuanced than that - I never said faking it, people usually believe what they write in those documents/ppts. And they do actually sound clever. Next time you see a decision of any magnitude, especially something which sounds "strategic" - trace the decision back as far as you can, consider the question from several angles, and really question it. You will see gaping holes, decisions made using "frameworks", anecdotes, hopes and dreams.

It's not counterpoint, it's a fact. Can you say with your hand on your heart that the typical user experience was acceptable before AI arrived?

The reply was always "It's hard, and there are always going to be bugs."

But it's not just about bugs. It's about systems that are hard to use, poorly designed, and opaque. And sometimes the opacity is deliberate. There are dark patterns, outright lies about what happens to data, and more or less obvious grifts.

Was any of this truly great before AI arrived?

Is it an accident that you can't kill an MS365 subscription if you have more than X amount of GB on OneDrive, but the actual usage includes all your spam and email attachments, and it doesn't show up unless you know where to find it, and the location is very non-obvious, and so is the cleanup and deletion process?

Or that the eBay fee structure for international sales is utterly incomprehensible without automated help?

Or that if you select Subscribe and Save on Amazon your cancellation date is something like two weeks before the next delivery?

Or that if you sign up to Discord you need a mobile and an email for activation, but the site doesn't tell you this, and nor do tech support, who insist that a mobile is optional?

And software quality - services down, records lost, records stolen, photos and documents deleted - is a whole other layer on top of that.

AI is a moderately good solution to the first set of problems, because it can search and assemble information far more quickly than you can. So IME it's pretty damn good at tech support - not perfect, but better than DIY in many cases.

Software quality? We'll see what happens. If tech stacks collapse over the next couple of years we'll know AI was terrible thing.

I'm in the 'Too early to tell' camp. There's a fair chance they might. But if so it will be because of poor testing and design, not because of code review or lack of hand-rolled code. And it's not completely clear that quality levels wouldn't have dropped anyway.