Today, a freelance javascript developer at my office told me that he designed a new website for one of his customers. I was intrigued that he is also designing and was very interested.

He showed me some images and I asked how he designed it. I thought he would come up with Figma, Sketch or whatever software, but he showed me the AI prompt.

I told him that he did not design it, but AI did that, prompting AI is not designing. He did not agree and rephrased it as "I made this".

After I said "But if I go to a bakery and ask for a cake with some nice decorations, and the baker is making that, I did not make the cake". He angry said, "You don't understand AI," and put his earplugs in and isn't talking to me since.

Prompting an AI is not creating. The AI/computing power with it's context is creating your stuff..

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

We need to update the slang "script kiddie" to "prompt enginot" or something.

So my boss's boss or someone even higher up drank the generative AI kool-aid and hired a 40-something kid to generate images for the marketing teams (or something like it).
Naturally, things soon went to shit.
The bloke already left, having staid less than six months on the job.
Guess who got to handle all the shit-is-currently-on-fire the kiddie left behind?

First impression: apparently, muggles tried to slak him some very broad descriptions of what they needed, and at first he actually tried to summarize those bark-speech pseudo-words into an actual prompt.
It does not seem to have gone for too long, though.
After users requested changes to the AI outputs, he would update the prompts, all right. And the process seemed to go fast enough... until reaching near-to-completion status.
Then users would request the tiniest changes to the AI output...
And the bloke couldn't do it.
Seriously. Some things were as simple as "we need this slider to go all the way up to 180% instead of 100%" on a lame dashboard and *kid. could. not. do. it.*.

In many cases he literally just gave up and copied the slak history into the AI prompt. No dice.

Bloke couldn't code a print('hello world') into a jupyter notebook cell, that's what i'm saying.
Apparently, he was "self taught", too. And was hired to "speed up the process of generating visual aids for usage in meetings and presentations". But then "the budget for this position was considered excessive" (meaning: shit results from a raw idea some executive crapped some day) and "the position was expanded to include the development of Business Inteligence Dashboards and Data Apps".

So now it is up to me (and my CRIMINALLY UNDERPAID team) to clean up his mess and maintain/fix/deprecate DOZENS of SHODDILY DESIGNED and MOSTLY USELESS but QUITE ACTIVE "data vis" PIECES OF SHIT.

Fuck "AI prompters", fucking snake oil script kiddies.

Retoor's recent bot army fiasco is why we don't put AI in charge of anything. It wasn't a bug in her code, it was her AI misinterpreting her prompts while having access to the data bots act upon. Essentially, retoor's AI added a lot of legitimate users to the list of spammers, and the issue was in prompting, not in code.

Holy fucking crap, think I actually got some productive, positive output from this whole generative AI debacle.
Rather because I skipped the whole Prompt step and used FOMO blabber against itself.

Some context: at my last gig we had a whole "humanware procurement department" (A.K.A. "hiring managers", those fucks who think that javascript and java are the same thing). It was during the pandemic tech hiring boom. At this new joint I'm at, a MUCH smaller company, I gotta do it myself. Boring as fuck but at least I can get some good karma by not making an ass of myself for candidates, and trying to make this whole process a tad less abusive.
I got my reading up to date, and surprisingly enough, "yankee dandy" (HBR) has actually been saying one or two things that are not complete hogwash. For a start, they say that companies have been making their hiring processes overly complex and even after hours of interviews they hardly measure half the skills they actually need, and spend too long talking about many skills that are not actually required for the positions.
"Huh. That sounds like the inneficiencies that the stupid 'AI will make meetings more efficient' industry is overpromising to overturn"

So I tried a new thing. Instead of your off-the-shelf "solve this NP-Hard problem in O(1) then draw this bird using only your nose then invert a binary tree in COBOL then tell me what type of sitcom character are you" crap, I tried grasping how it would be like to work with the candidates. One at a time. Not too long, but not too short talks. I'm not trying to check if a kid really knows how to implement a solution for the TSP in apache spark, or if they know every cipher in TLS 1.3. I just want to know if they can understand a technical request and come to me with a plan on how to solve it without handholding or "just use a really big VM, like, 32Tb of RAM!"
Thus, if I can work with them. That's all. The rest are specific skills that can be trained in time, if the person is willing to learn new stuff.
But that is not good enough for HR, ooooh, no. You "need" an "objective way of measuring their skills", otherwise its "just biased opinions."

But that gave me an idea.
See, our HR VP is someone deep in the whole AI pyramid scheme, who drank the kool-aid and swallowed up even the cup. FOMO is their name. Hype is their business.
I posh'd up my bullshit'ish jargon and went whole "In the advent of new disruptive technologies, strategic skills can be acquired with grit and proper AI prompting. Thus, leveraging our collaborative intelligence capabilities we can hack our challenges and optimize our resources to offer more innovative opportunities and bolster our employer branding" - translation: "shut up and lemme hire someone good and reasonably priced instead of a sleazy smooth talker who wants 100M just to show up and play with chatgpt all day". The whole point is to make it sound like "we're using AI, so it's good" instead of "im doing the work I'm being paid for, so it's old-fashioned"

It seems like the HR troll swallowed it, bait and hook. Maybe all we really needed this whole time is to say the magic word "AI," especially if it makes absolutely no sense in the context. Now I want to get them to sign off on a "AI mindfulness bolstering platform" (a massage chair). Fingers crossed.

I absolutely despise state of org structures in mid-big companies due to mediocre devs and more than that mediocre middle managers that are responsible for putting out policies.

They are on doom spiral but somehow keep themselves afloat. Heard a policy for one of them is like you need to be using AI for 80% of your job? They are being run as if the person using it is unable to think for themselves. If you are micromanaging prompting why not fire the plebian, and use agents and 100% AI bitch.

But most companies are like this, why?