I dislike the noise of people worshiping LLMs. I know everybody’s already tired of hearing about AI, but I’m not forcing you to read this, so just dip now if you don’t wanna hear it.

When arguing for or against LLM usage, one of the most common footholds people latch onto is productivity. AI will make you more productive. Agents will cause brain drain, negatively affecting productivity in the long term. We need to make sacrifices to find what productivity gains we can get from AI. It’s the obsession with productivity that I just don’t understand. Why are you so obsessed with increasing output, when any additional increase in profit isn’t going to be passed on to you or your fellow workers? Why are you so comfortable with outsourcing your skill development and labor value to trillion dollar companies?

Recently, after reading Quality in the age of Slop, it became clear to me there’s a disconnect in what each of us cares about. I care about learning a system inside and out, building a theory of the program, and making something high quality. I don’t just want to have the thing, I want a direct hand in making the thing.

When I try to put myself in the shoes of the people so concerned with productivity, I can’t help but feel sadness, because I don’t believe these are healthy priorities. I think spending their entire lives surrounded by a culture of greed warped the metric they use to measure their self worth, which is now inextricably linked to the output they produce for the ruling class. When someone criticizes AI, a symbol for a new era of productivity, they feel attacked and lash out in kind. This is not the result of a healthy mindset.

Somewhere along the line the capitalist machine convinced these people that their primary function is to produce output, and they need to love it. I think that sucks. I don’t think this is something that can be easily undone by arguing with them. I think it’s up to them to reconsider what they want according to their true personal values, not the values ingrained in them by others. I hope that leads to something better.