I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.

I've recently come to the thought that the reason why I find AI so snake-oily is because it isn't solving the bottlenecks of the use-cases it is being applied to.

The problem with customer service was never the frontline support agents but rather that these frontline agents are not empowered to solve the problems they encounter. I once had a human agent admit to me I was wrongly charged but they could not refund me on the spot because of protocol. Replace that agent with the smartest model and it still wouldn't have improved that interaction! (Of course, the business saves money if the AI costs a fraction of a human agent's salary.)

I'll take a shot in the dark and bet there was always an obscure/poorly documented way to solve your problem and that the AI could just find it in its playbook faster; it's search after all! It's also not inconceivable to go as far as to wager that a _human agent_ would just have been as effective; maybe the protocol to do it wasn't some obscure procedure for customer support.

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That said, this is why I'm in disbelief that AI is bringing in as much value to the table as claimed. I realized that in software, it was never shipping the code that was the bottleneck to profit. I could be the mythical 10x productive engineer but all my output is still gonna be gated by things like testing of all sorts, customer acquisition, product development and design. Testing and product dev you could maybe automate but only after putting in considerable legwork yourself.

And of course, shipping 10x more features does not mean you'll get 10x more profit, not even that you'll get 10x more customers.

I have a friend working for an international law firm which has recently made a big push for responsible AI use. (I won't say which firm but the first partner name has to do with croissants and they recently organized an internal AI congress in Spain.) So, they are paying for AI subscriptions but I sincerely wonder if that's adding to their bottom line since their profit is bottlenecked by (a) how much billable hours they can account for and (b) the judicial process which famously moves at a glacial pace.

It's just a pattern I repeatedly notice when I look closer into things. And of course, as we all know, the cost of AI services today is still heavily subsidized by VC money. When that money is gone, I worry we'll be stuck with _expensive_ AI-centric workflows that's not really adding value to the business.

it really depends on if it can do useful actions, and both you and the company can reasonably trust that it will actually do the right thing

IMO it also depends on having a working alternative for when the fuzzy automated system fails to work... except that's the stuff companies want to eliminate in order to (theoretically) save money.

> If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

Have you looked around at the current state of wealth inequality?! The internet (without AI) already did that.

But what about putting food on the table for your babies and spouse?

What about a backend that prompts the LLM at runtime and generates a new frontend for every user? It'd be like A/B (C/D/E/F..) testing with no possible way to validate the results or fix bugs. Somebody make me their CTO, quick.

I make sure I frequently talk about running a marathon someday, just so all my friends think I'm in better shape than I am.

The iPant? Or a Samsung WCPP1?

"betatester for bananaware" hahaha amazing

Exactly! This whole sentiment reminds me of the Jobs quote "people don't know what they want until you show it to them".

That's the ad-free version, it's an extra $12.99 a month.

it's not really worth it after the recent price-hike, they aren't putting out content like they used to

People assume that accessibility is all about some small minority of less abled people who can't "read good", but it's a broad category that affects all users. If you build following the guidelines then you end up with a quality product that can be used by people who stumbled upon it while doom-scrolling instead of enjoying their beach vacation. The best analogy I heard was about drop-kerbs/curb-cuts... people wonder why we're catering for a small minority of wheelchair users everywhere and then they have a kid (or wheel luggage from the airport) and realize how great they are.

Yup, accessibility is literally about broadening the population of people who can use your software. It's often associated with affordances for the less-abled, but that's just a subset of accessibility. I don't get the hostility! Just a guess but maybe 1 in 50 or so developers I've worked with in the past didn't just "not care" about accessibility but were outright hostile to it, as in affirmatively "We should not spend time working on this!" Bizarre.