Yet another post on AI

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 09:33:58 +0000

Another post? But I’ve not written about it here! I have so many partially started angry, sad rants penned in Joplin (which is starting on the enshittification path with AI going off the latest change log). Problem is I can’t finish them I find I’m not eloquent enough to articulate why I’m so reluctant to embrace and use it. So here goes.

Part of this is because I’m so pressured by work to use it. Our own title here has called people stupid for not using it. I’ve watched as said person is proud of using n figures of money to do stuff with AI. Apologies for being vague here but I have to. Another person has a chat session configured to be an architect and senior engineer so they can run problems past them instead of talking to the people they work with, it’s quicker apparently.

The solution to all work problems is throw AI at it. I snapped recently in a meeting exclaiming “I must be the only person left who loves programming”. It was met with a stunned silence, I doubt there was any major revelation. I’m passionate about this. I’m a self taught developer and engineer. My degree was called Multimedia with E-commerce systems, we did Macromedia Director (yeah I’m old now) as a module the year it was discontinued, how else do you think I managed to get here? I’m proud of the work I put in, it took real effort.

I feel we’re losing the dialect of programming. My way might not be right but with AI it’s all the same. For example if I program in a broad Yorkshire accent someone else in a Geordie accent it’s what makes us good at our job and unique, there’s a nuance to how we write code. What I’m seeing now is a Slop accent, it’s all the the same and just like that we’re losing what it means to be individual and what makes a good team great. At least we’re shipping through right?

Another thing that’s fucking winding me up is people talking about how AI is intelligent and going to end the world. It will destroy the world just not in the way you think, it’ll start with extreme weather (oh), water becoming a scarce resource, housing being bulldozed for massive data centres. I mean it’s already started. Oh and while I’m at it all those AI broke out of its controls is just marketing and fuck me do C suite love that, it justified them spending so much money, don’t get me started on their love of Microsoft.

Let’s talk about slop bombs for a second. These come in many forms whether it be PRs both code and the request or reams of text in chat. Don’t just don’t. It’s such a cognitive headache if you can’t be bothered to type it yourself then don’t send a slop bomb. Do you have any idea how hard it is to read paragraphs of emdash bullshit knowing you have to because it’s your job. It’s disrespectful, you clearly don’t respect my time or effort needed to review what you’ve sent me. We can spot it a mile away as well so don’t try and hide it. Side note I dislike how AWS ProAIserve work.

I’m not stupid I can see I’m being left behind and like a good engineer I WANT to learn new tech. So I decided to give rebuilding https://sundaylunch.club a go. What a mess. It’s based on Hugo and simple CSS theme. I asked it to create some simple things and it completely butchered the html. It didn’t work within the confines of the theme and decided to write it’s own html, CSS and js. Sure it got the job done but it’s not maintainable in the long run. What got me the most is that it wasn’t FUN. Typing in an instruction and watching it burn money isn’t fun for me, you could argue that work isn’t fun but then what’s the point in spending your best years of your life smashing your head into a keyboard and watching text magically appear hoping it does what you expect and doesn’t delete your email.

Future me here: I’m in the progress of ripping out all the janky html and css it’s created, ironically it’s taking me longer to fix it than it would if I’d just done it myself in the first place.

I went through a phase where I thought AI might be useful to bootstrap a project but quickly realised that it made more sense to do it yourself and learn the tools your blindly installing and configuring. It did recommend some interesting new Python tools which I didn’t know about so there was some net gain but not sure it was worth the 8lts or water or 12 trees I killed to get the info.

AI doesn’t mesh with the way I work and ethics of what a good project or workflow is. I guess I’m going to be left behind while people vibe code the next fire. What I mean is I have a lot of time honing the tools I use and I like thinking the problem through and finding nice solutions, I like to think of it as using a scalpel for surgery and not a jackhammer.

So yeah I’m angry, sad and most importantly lost. I’m back in work next week (no idea why I’m writing this on a sunbed overlooking the Ionian sea) and I don’t really know what to do. I’m locked into the job because of the salary, I have to support my family so moving isn’t an option at the moment. But wow does a cabin in the woods with no one around for miles sound amazing right now. I always did like the idea of taking up wood work.

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Yet another post on AI