My job has been publicly promoting who's on top of the "AI use dashboard" while our whole product falls apart. Surely this house of cards has to collapse at some point, better get public money before it does.
I see it everywhere in my private circles, I'm not sure the story is truly reaching the big public.
I've gone through many many fads and smoke during my career, but this is the first time I'm actually worried about things falling apart.
As you say, I think things are just going to fall apart and we're just going to have to learn the hard way.
It would be an awesome thing to see. But would need to be hosted in another country like PirateBay
Also, what is their incentive?
My company has a vibe coded leaderboard tracking AI usage.
Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.
The AI-era equivalent of that old Dilbert strip about rewarding developers directly for fixing bugs ("I'm gonna write me a new mini-van this afternoon!") just substitute intentional bug creation with setting up a simple agent loop to burn tokens on random unnecessary refactoring.
The agent will churn in a loop for a good 15-20 minutes and make the leaderboard number go up. The result is verbose and useless but it satisfies the metrics from leadership.
I'm going nuts, because as I was "growing up" as a programmer (that was 20+ years ago) it was stuff like this [1] that made me (and people like me) proud to be called a computer programmer. Copy-pasting it in here, for future reference, and because things have turned out so bleak:
> They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. (...)
> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. (...)
> He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
If that's accurate, that means what, like 11% of the human population is using their product, and the average user pays $15?
That seems incredibly high, especially for poorer countries.
Still, I do know that if I go to a random cafe in the developed world and peep at people's screens, I'm very likely to see a ChatGPT window open, even on wildly non-technical people's screens.