Looking at my first two posts this may feel like I'm avoiding at all costs to talk about actual tech and I'm going
for some kind of "capitalism bad" agenda or something. This is not my objective and this will possibly be my last
rant towards this. See, for quite some time I had some stuff stuck at the back of my throat I just wanted to write it
down somewhere.
I grew up messing around with computers, video games and eletronics in general. I wrote my first line of code when I was around 13 (more than half my life) and never stopped since. One of my main sources of joy is writing and talking about code, watching videos about it, learning, studying, seeing about areas within tech I could never fully understand due to limited time (job+personal life takes a big chunk of it). But for years now I'm just tired. Full tired. Not because I dislike coding now, not at all. I still enjoy writing and doing my own projects. My problem is with everything else.
If you're not part of the tech community or don't work on tech, it might be quite shocking when I say that tech is one of the most toxic and stupid areas out there -- not because of tech itself but because of how it presents itself towards the market. See, there's this whole notion of "we need to be innovative" or something similar (every company has it's own "motto") that actually can translate to "we need to make way more money". At first you may think "Oh, that's normal. It's a job and a company, the main objective is indeed money" and you're right, but the biggest difference is the shit ton of money available in tech and this makes ALL the difference.
As of 2025, out of the 10 richest people in the world, 7 is from tech. The meaning of this is that tech has a SHIT TON OF MONEY available, with a bunch of rich guys trying to get more money out of it. This makes tech an insufferable extremely competitive field, meaning that people is always striving to find one single scenario they can grow on. It's really easy to earn money in tech! It's even easier to go bankrupt. Most startups out there create a product doing something -- always claiming it's some kind of innovation, of course -- and start having customers until they can capture VC from some backer. Most startups NEVER get to actually make money from their products, everything comes from VC. That means the company and the product itself becomes a shit show, the mission is not "let's make it better, we need to build something good!", but "let's make it better, or else shareholders won't invest on us again!" -- and this impacts DEEPLY on how software is developed. For years now most commercial software out there was not written with you, the user, in mind, but the shareholders. Reason? You don't pay our AWS account, they do.
So the cycle has been always the same: one comes up with multiple ideas (not everyone makes it first time),
implements each one of them in the most shitty and rushed way possible (we need to be quick, or else someone can
implement it first!), tries to push it down everyone's throat (if we have a good sales and CS team, that means
engineers can work in more features instead of fixing stuff!), tries to capture VC ("we're a new startup focused on
innovation" I'm sure you heard that before), get's VC money, uses all VC money (our software is really shitty
because we rushed it for some reason no one knows, maybe we need more engineers? yeah, totally, we have VC),
shareholder gets angry and threatens to stop pumping money (don't worry, we'll have everything you need here), pushes
harder towards some imaginary deadline + starts cutting costs (layoff, suddenly everyone cares about infra, etc), and
either it works for some more years or it goes bankrupt sometime after.
But, from times to times, there's some mystical and "innovative" new shining piece of technology that, whatever shit you do with it, some shareholder will give you money. That means the first steps I described above can be virtually skipped (if this technology is innovation by itself, I don't need to be innovative! That's genius!), which results in a bunch of people that pretend they have any idea of what they're doing but in fact they're just playing the same game as everyone else and are hoping it works for as long as possible. The current "entrepreneurship silver bullet" is (you guessed it) AI.
AI is not, by any means, bad tech. It's a whole field within Computer Science with a bunch of amazing solutions involved -- from hard problems optimization (such as Lossless video scaling, rendering frame prediction, analysis of genome data, etc), to computer vision, voice recognition, video game analysis, video-game AIs and more. For many years now we've been using AI daily in some way or another, waaay before LLMs were a thing. The reason why people didn't refer to them as AI that much is probably due to the AI effect, and the reason why LLMs are still being referred as AI is because of marketing. That's the only reason, marketing. LLMs are very cool indeed: they're basically a text prediction machine. If your data can be parsed as text, they will most likely be useful in some way. And not only that, but thanks to LLMs 1. AI fields are being more recognized then never before and 2. a lot of real innovations were accomplished on the way to achieve what we have today. That's marvelous... but the problem with LLMs are the overhype and the instrumentation of this overhype as a market maneuver.
Companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI lives from LLMs. And they need every penny possible because LLMs are really pricey. There's just NO WAY they'll let the hype die. That's why every time the market is cooling off SUDDENLY there's a new "OpenAI Product X" or "ChatGPT X.X -- now surpasses everyone's benchmarks" or even "Sam Altman says 'we achieved AGI, but we're afraid to release it'"... really? This is bullshit. If you take any real researcher that doesn't work for any of those companies the predictions and conclusions are always astronomically different. People tend to forget that Sam Altman's is NOT a researcher. His an entrepreneur. While yes, he went to Stanford for CS, he never graduated and never worked with tech directly. His first job was "being CEO of Loopt". Now you tell me, you really think this guys has any idea what the hell is actually going on with researches? You really think his predictions are accurate? That's the same as asking Chris Kempczinski to make a Big Mac, that won't happen. Different jobs. They don't need to know what the shit they're saying, they just need to sell. And this is not a Sam Altman-only thing, or AI LLM-only thing -- this is how ALL the industry works: 1. have some (usually shitty) idea, 2. get tons of money, 3. hire a bunch of people, 4. sell it as a technical panacea for as long as you can.
AI is not bad tech. The problem is that tech is bad. I'm not talking about tech itself, but the market around it. It's just some stupid billionaire's race. People that aims only for money and only that. One may argue that it's always been like that -- and that's true. The difference is that now with all the tools available this can (and will) be really harmful for the field (+everyone's mental health in the industry is shit). I'll probably never stop coding or messing up with old junk circuits around the house. I'll never stop thinking about software architecture, and how software is cool and can help lots of people. I'll never stop trying to help people to learn software, or help people through software. But I can't imagine working on the industry for more than 5 years now. It just sucks.