Though my sample size is small, these stories fit my thesis that the real AI jobs crisis is that the drumbeat, marketing, and pop culture of "powerful AI” encourages and permits management to replace or degrade jobs they might not otherwise have. More important than the technological change, perhaps, is the change in a social permission structure.

Agreed. If a company says “we’ve automated this job and it’s now done by AI,” they mean “we’ve decided to take advantage of media trends by dramatically lowering the quality and reliability of our processes, consistent with our policy of doing things as cheaply as our customers will tolerate.”

No. The number of users who have a real email with no TLD is far less than the number of users who will accidentally type an email with no TLD if you don’t validate on the front end.

I’m here to help 99.9% of users sign up correctly, not to be completely spec-compliant for the 0.1% who think they’re special.

Let us recite the email validator’s oath:

If it has something before the @, something between the @ and the ., and something after the ., it’s valid enough.

Clearly LLMs are useful to software engineers.

Citation needed. I don’t use one. If my coworkers do, they’re very quiet about it. More than half the posts I see promoting them, even as “just a tool,” are from people with obvious conflicts of interest. What’s “clear” to me is that the Overton window has been dragged kicking and screaming to the extreme end of the scale by five years of constant press releases masquerading as news and billions of dollars of market speculation.

I’m not going to delegate the easiest part of my job to something that’s undeniably worse at it. I’m not going to pass up opportunities to understand a system better in hopes of getting 30-minute tasks done in 10. And I’m definitely not going to pay for the privilege.

I’ve seen a handful of new startups posting about their 4-day, 32-hour work weeks. I can only imagine they’re bringing on a scuzzton of top talent at middle-of-the-road prices.

When one of them IPOs for a billion dollars, I hope their employees are incredibly annoying about it. I hope they never shut up. I hope my LinkedIn feed is wall-to-wall “look what you can do on four days a week.” I hope they go door to door with a Rolex on both wrists and say “hello, sir/madam, I just wanted you to know I haven’t worked a Friday in five years.” I hope they post pictures of themselves relaxing with a martini at the start of every three-day weekend and people go ballistic in the comments and they don’t even notice because they’re too busy doing interviews with Forbes and Fortune Magazine. I hope I get sick and tired of hearing about four day weeks.

I’m sure as hell tired of hearing about execs that want their employees to burn out.