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Comment by cryo32 | Hacker News Reader

This contains my personal disdain for AI. Using it to do bullshit work. That’s solving a symptom. Stop doing bullshit. Stop using tools and processes which are bullshit heavy. Stop sitting there silently accepting bullshit. And certainly don’t pick another tool which is trained in bullshit and ask it how to do things.

One wonderful thing I’ve watched for the last 4 years is my company fail to build a modelling tool better than Excel. On attempt 3 we have some pile of shit Claude generated on nodejs and Postgres on kubernetes which can’t replace a single spreadsheet written in 2008. Because everyone thought into the bullshit not the solution or the requirements.

Edit: thinking further, it appears people forgot what the problems are and think from the solution back. That never works. But it sells tools.

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LLMs are life-changing for a dev who has been writing code for 20+ years (because I am tired of it).

Outside of AI's impact on software, which is massive, the biggest change that we are going to see, I think, is the crushing amount of useless information generated by it.

We already see how everything is racing to the lowest common denominator once we granted Average Human Intelligence unfettered access to expressing thought via social media.

Now that Average Human Intelligence just has a button that says "Generate Bullshit For Me. Send to the World".

UGH.

Oh 99% of the lines of code we write don't do anything because the tools and languages are crap. Only reason LLM looks good is it's an easy way around the over-abstraction of everything.

> useless information

That's a contradiction in terms. What is being generated is the opposite of information that just clogs the pipes: Slop.

"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better" -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Most workers are just that, workers. They don't have a say in their work, bullshit or real. Only the lucky ones have the opportunity to say "Hey, I've been thinking about this [task/report/whatever] - do we really need it?" and get a "You're right, let's reevaluate this." from their boss / manager.

Or even worse, many employers and employees alike are afraid to cut out BS work - because it could realistically mean cutting down on the workforce. So they continue to produce work that no one checks, because at least then they can justify their position.

taps the "most jobs are bullshit" sign

They are not about actually "doing things", they are social validation, particularly the part where the people with resources/capital enjoy your company and give you what you need to live a dignified lifestyle in exchange for it.

But acknowledging and acting on this would destroy the leverage the useless-but-likeable have in terms of being able to get paid, and that the owner class have in terms of getting people to pretend that they like them/validate their often cruel and avaricious choices and behavior.

+1 - the Office Bullshit Worker is the one upholding this shit these days- adding some of those creepy unnecessary images to their slide-decks, writing those godawful oververbose e-mails and fucking not being able to take notes without their AI. Why the fuck are you even in the meeting if you cannot note down the key points afterwards.

A couple of months back my boss asked me why I didn't use AI all that much. I told him that I didn't think it made me more productive in the tasks at was doing at the time (having to wrangle undocumented really custom legacy infra stuff).

He told me he found AI to make him really productive and said something along the lines of: "It's really good at summarizing long reports and it saves me time when I have to write end of quarter status updates".

I'm convinced about 50% of management decisions come from Claude now.

50% I think is kind of low, but it will be definitely higher. These people are not deep thinkers in the first place - and they will succumb to cognitive surrender pretty quickly.

Cognitive surrender is an amazing term.

This is from: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/ai-claude-chatgpt...

Agree, indeed a great term. I will adopt it in discussions with AI boosters.

Yep. We made the largest single loss ever last financial year and the previous "our year ahead" presentation was literally ChatGPT dross that didn't many any sense. There was a percentage fucking pie chart that didn't add up to 100%

> and it saves me time when I have to write end of quarter status updates".

You boss is a fucking moron. How is that shit even legal, especially in publicly traded companies I wonder? It makes me livid - people invest their pension funds into these companies which are managed by shitty slot machines now?

Not to mention that there is a reason why long reports are long - they contain details that will invariably be skipped by the LLM-ShitGenerators. But I guess it makes them "productive".

One other thing I noticed - the AI idiots are always the ones to volunteer their "experience" and say how they find it super helpful. Not once have I heard them say they find it useful, and that is after they first hear you say it's not helpful and explain in detail why. Dunning-Kruger or not, but they must think they are smarter and seeing something we are not seeing, for some reason.

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