Tech Stories from a Human perspective.

My younger sister graduated with a CompSci degree a few years ago. I've been behind her, motivating her and demystifying the world of programming from the very beginning. There was a piece of advice I repeated everyday, trying to make her understand how to operate. The problem was, she was trying to read and understand every line of code in a function before using it. I thought it was non-sense. Someone, much smarter than us has created that function, it's part of a vetted library, it has been tested already. All you have to do is use it. "After all, you don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine works, yet you feel safe driving your car, don't you?"

This is a rant. It didn't start today, but I think I've reached the end of the line. The straw that broke the camel's back, so to say. I used an internal tool for the first time. I logged in and navigated through the web app, making some updates here and there. All was well. But then I made the mistake of wanting to go back to the initial dashboard. I clicked the back button, and instead of returning to the previous page, I saw Chrome's default tab page staring right back at me.

ppclp.ai, North America's third-largest AI-native manufacturer of premium wire-formed office fasteners, formerly known as Paper Clip Company, announced a landmark 100x improvement in its proprietary Organizational Productivity Index (OPI™), cementing what leadership is calling "a new era of operational excellence" and "a little bit of a miracle."

It's a signal. People want better jobs. That's why we get AI-generated PRs. We told everyone, in order to get your resume taken seriously, you need to show your work.

I've remained subscribed to some newsletters for over 20 years. The authors managed to keep my attention all that time. But then, one day, they decided to switch to an AI-generated newsletter without making any announcement.

Whenever I saw someone type a natural language query into Google, it made me cringe. "It's not a person," I would say. "Type like you're talking to a machine." This was especially true for programmers and it was before AI took over everything.