A world of agents
Something funny started happening around 2022, we all knew it was coming at the time, and yet, no one was really prepared for it.. back then when I applied for jobs it would involve some sort of explanation during interviews, interviewers would show a sense of awe and curiosity that I was actually using plugins on VsCode to help me write code based on AI, autocomplete was a new thing and I was using it to help me find functions in my code faster, fix typos, fetch documentation, and even at times, it would go as far as writing the whole function with just the name and pressing TAB. Of course I would have to go back and edit the code to fix the bugs or adapt it to my needs, but it was quite impressive and also prone to failure like 90% of the times. But I loved it because it saved me a bunch of time.
This was just a small omen of what came next, over the next years I have seen coworkers, people online, and even friends who never touched a code editor in their lives, using AI to make stuff work. And that is the most impressive part; they actually got the job done, and if you knew what you were doing, things got done right.
It is still funny to me to hear people saying it will replace us devs.. that was the speech ever since it became mainstream to work with AI, but the reality is that, we are needed for our problem solving skills, not for our sheer coding net output, and though the AI can actually solve some problems when you put it trough it, you still need a guiding hand to make sure what it does is actually correct and works as you expect it to, Not only that, but I think it was a settled discussion that no matter how much code you write, its about the quality and the systems you put up that determine how good of a developer you are. And AI, whilst its pretty good at making code that works well now, it still lacks a proper sense of context outside of the code, the creativity to find solutions to problems that require some new novel or out of the box approach to them, rather than just copypasting the idea from their feeded inputs.
What was also pretty interesting and sad for me to see over the past year or so, if the absurd number of instances where companies are triying to actually use AI to replace humans at work; I have seen companies selling AI to replace people at Sales, Human Resources, Customer Support, and even Marketing. Its not scary to me, its just sad to see how people are willing to pay for it, and seeing how bad the results are, it’s just a waste of time and money, not only for the companies falling for it, but also for the users who are not getting any better services or end results because of it.
Now, the nitty gritty of the this new world we are living in now (yes, we are living in it, its not some dystopian future thing) is that everything is being built around the user of AI agents today, right now. Its demoralizing in a sense, so see and when you notice it really pisses me off in a way, not in a “tHy tOoK oUr JaBzz!” kind of way, but because companies are triying to make agents work in places where its just ridiculous or just enshitifies the whole experience for users, rather than making things better, just because its a fashion trend. A clear example of this are AI assisted search engines; the point, for me, of using search engines was to find websites via keywords, say for example I want to quickly go to the wikipedia site of a famous person, I would just type “[some dude] wiki” and voila!, just click the first result and you got it. Now, if you type the same query, you get a list of results that are not just websites, but also videos, news, some random datasheet of the person, if its an actor you get the movies list they worked on, its music its age an AI resume and only if you sroll down trough all of that you actually get to the web link results.
Funnily too, this might all be temporary, we are still learning how to use Ai, and companies are still measuring how much we like it or not. Google for example has rolled back the AI-first features on their main site, now listing the most relevant results first, rather than the AI-summarized ones (granted, I use some extensions to clean up the ads from the results), Microslop is now dealing with the aftermath of people simply moving to Linux because Windows 11 is just full of Bing, ads and forced AI slop. Meanwhile Apple and OpenAI are fighting for your personal data harvesting, and we havent even started to actually pay the full cost of computing per token yet! (Claude Code is absurdly cheap if you account for the millons of tokens you can run per week); it might be that, we are going to reach a middleground where we end up with less AI on the internet, actually.
This is not really a complaint about the feature of itself (sure it could be nice to have that quick extra info on a site), but I think mixing it up or plainly replacing the regular, untainted website, and just triying to jam it on the throat of users is terribly bad idea.. But hey maybe im just an old man yelling at clouds.. After all, thats why we embrace the Neocities model.
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