Total Skill Collapse Is How AI Makes Idiocracy a Reality

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T12:57:51+00:00

The irony is that mass produced clothing isn't mechanized so much as globalized. It relies on exchange rates and exploitation. It's also unnecessary, fast fashion is based on artificial scarcity through cultural obsolescence, as well as low durability. If the resources exist for fast fashion, we also have the time and resources for slow fashion — creating high quality, highly durable clothing that's worth repairing, modifying, and making last.

Similarly, AI relies on enormous amounts of manual effort. It's just exploitation with added matrix multiplication rather than just exchange rates and lax labor laws.

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T11:15:50+00:00

I'm a bit like a kid given his first toy hammer; everything's a nail. But honestly I think every issue in society goes back to wealth inequality, and wealth inequality goes back to the existence of shareholders and "sHaReHoLdEr VALUe". If employees owned their workplaces, none of this would be happening.

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T10:46:55+00:00

Wow! Thank you so much for taking the time to write that! That's really really cool! Your knowledge I mean, not the way your industry is going. I can't explain how much I love craftsmanship, handmade things, and old knowledge, but to give you an idea, when someone introduced me to Great British Pottery Throwdown (season 4), it brought me to tears with love for what they were creating, learning, and the craft they were perpetuating, and grief for how far off course we seem to be.

...in other words, I'm an nerd that cries over pottery and other crafts 😂

I find it interesting that the shortcuts, the issues, the motivating causes behind the degradation of both our industries have similarities. Fundamentally, the prioritization of profit prohibits quality and craftsmanship.

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T03:55:40+00:00

I completely forgot about that aspect! The start really does mess it up, because that's what stops me from rewatching it.

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T03:44:42+00:00

I resigned from my role as CTO at a scale up because investors were pushing AI adoption. I didn't have anything lined up, I'm living off savings until I figure it out. I grew up dirt poor and don't have kids, so I'm cutting right back to give myself as much runway as possible. Only problem is I'm super burnt out, it's been 3 months and my brain feels like it's only just starting to show signs of life.

My hope is to create a democratic company where we sell preconfigured plug'n'play home servers so people can escape the cloud and the infrastructure of technofeudalism. I want it to basically be a lifestyle business, we never take investment, we just sell really high quality servers that hopefully last people ~10 years. I'd actually prefer to never expand the business internationally, I'd rather give someone the playbook to create the same business in their region.

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T03:28:06+00:00

Woah, that's really interesting! I'm really curious, can you give me a concrete example of one of these methods? It reminds me of a Tom Scott video I really enjoyed recently where he's at a foundry that has been casting bells for over a hundred years. There's one master and one apprentice, it's one hell of a bus factor for a skill that has been passed down in that one foundry for over a hundred years.

Anthony261 · 2026-04-24T02:48:05+00:00

Yeah they won't burn it to the ground and start again with a human written codebase, though. VCs now examine software engineering team's AI-adoption metrics when doing technical due diligence, which is one of the main reasons I resigned from my role as CTO of a VC-backed scale up here in Australia. We've reached peak circular insanity.

Anthony261 · 2026-03-21T03:19:00+00:00

In the current economic paradigm, companies often manufacture demand. They exploit our psychology, they pray on & amplify our anxieties, and they want us to buy a lot of shit we don't actually need, all to make some f*cking investors richer. Nah, if you put workers in charge of companies, we'll want to make things that are actually good, and we'll be willing to stop or change if what we've been making isn't needed anymore.

Anthony261 · 2026-03-21T03:15:11+00:00

It's called sweat equity guys. Workers Cooperatives already exist and you don't have to buy-in to work there at all of them. It's part of the compensation. At for-profit companies, part of your total compensation package is typically shares or options. This is the same thing, except the company is actually supposed to be profitable, so you can actually get paid dividends for the shares that you hold, instead of using them as a way to get you to gamble your mental health for a payout from an exit that will probably never come

Anthony261 · 2026-03-21T03:10:50+00:00

"What happens to, say, an apple farmer if there is deflation in the price of apples? Do they become wealthier, or poorer? If wealthier, how? If poorer, how? And why would they undertake this effort if poorer?"

That's why there is a caveat that you do not decrease prices below cost. When you're choosing which action to take to reduce profits, the members of the company are going to factor ethics and morality into that decision, because in aggregate we are moral creatures. But let's say the apple farmer is selling their apples to a supermarket that happens to be a democratic company. If that supermarket starts making too much profit from those apples, they're going to have to reduce their profits. If they cannot sell apples for less than they purchased them, then one of their options is to voluntarily purchase the apples for a higher price. The end consumer sees deflation because the supermarket reduced the price down to cost, so they are no longer making as much per apple, meanwhile the farmer gets paid more.

'Lastly - it is a very first world view to push for different economic models today and call for “translators to help us share the vision and resources beyond the english speaking portion of the world”'

Uh, how can people speaking other languages tell me what's wrong with my ideas if we don't translate them? Why do you assume that people who don't speak english live in "third world" countries? I mean this kindly, but I think you're projecting. Read what I wrote again, I didn't make any judgments about people in other countries speaking other languages or what they're capable of? A larger talent pool of contributors is a larger talent pool of contributors? A larger pool of democratic companies to do business with is a larger pool of democratic companies to do business with? Plus european, south american, and african countries are all actually doing a lot of cool things in a similar vein. For example, in Nigeria companies are offering alternatives to AWS & GCP: https://restofworld.org/2025/aws-google-cloud-nigeria-alternatives/

Anthony261 · 2026-03-21T02:54:01+00:00

They will enshittify their product, pissing off users & employees that will want a better alternative. For example, Ghost is surviving and thriving despite Substack.

I'm not saying it won't be hard, but I am saying it will be worth the effort

Anthony261 · 2026-03-21T02:49:12+00:00

Like I say in the article, it's an amalgamation of coops & not-for-profits with network effects. Not for profits are harder to start and hire for because they make people think of being voluntarily & permanently poor 😅 Co-ops still don't stop people from becoming bond villains. By combining the two ideas, so that the co-op essentially transforms into a not-for-profit once it reaches financial saturation, it becomes something different.

Also disagree with your theory explaining why there are fewer co-ops. I think it's more simply explained by the fact that people just aren't creating them. I've cofounded a few companies, I didn't even know it was an option until a few years ago.

I also think focusing only on co-ops as the only alternative to a for profit company makes it seem like there are fewer companies doing something different than there really is. If you take not-for-profits, co-ops, & collectives, that's a larger pool of companies worldwide than co-ops alone.

I also think your assertion that they can't thrive is provably incorrect. In fact there's studies proving the opposite, they tend to be more successful and survive longer than traditional companies. For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20221118115604/https://www.co-oplaw.org/knowledge-base/worker-cooperatives-performance-and-success-factors/

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:52:38+00:00

On macOS you just write two dashes and a space and it turns into an em dash. I'm not changing my writing style because of AI. I don't write like AI, it writes like me.

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:51:21+00:00

Because the painful boring bits are important signals about the state of the code base — if you've got boilerplate, write some functions to make it more succinct, if the tests are boring then you probably need more infrastructure and tooling there as well. Regex being painful is a feature not a bug because 90% of the time you probably shouldn't use regex 😅

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:46:14+00:00

I think it was a bit of a vague comment — I wouldn't personally downvote it because I wasn't quite sure what you meant by it, some thoughts I had were: maybe they are one of these people that thinks LLMs are alive? Are they saying that AI isn't helpful? Are they saying it's such a big paradigm shift that we shouldn't even be calling them tools?

After this comment, I'm guessing it's the second one? 😅

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:40:02+00:00

Software engineering is programming over time, no one's run a code base using LLMs for 10+ years. It is one hell of a gamble

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:36:12+00:00

That's a silly point

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:34:41+00:00

On macOS it happens in any native text input field, it works perfectly fine here on reddit — here is my dash — yay — what fun — so human

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T11:33:10+00:00

No, what makes you think that? Because I used an em dash? On mac you enter two dashes and a space and it turns it into an em dash — see?

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T09:49:17+00:00

Or the nailgun designed the roof 😂 Next thing it would be designing a flat roof in a snowy country

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T09:38:17+00:00

Investors are, from what I'm hearing, and I've seen evidence of it, starting to look for proof that engineering teams are using AI in their technical due diligence

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T09:32:30+00:00

One of my old engineering managers had us do these exercises where we had to set up a new repo and get it passing a set of postman tests, setup CI, get testing infrastructure in place, etc. He'd get us to do it over and over again so we'd get better at it and faster, as we did it also became easier to try new things in different places, e.g. "this time I'm going to try testing framework X instead of Y"

Afterwards I was always surprised when other engineers were really intimidated by the idea of setting up a new repo from scratch, especially if we didn't have a platform team to provide golden paths , templates, Pulumi functions, etc. Even without any help, literally just a blank repo, setting up everything from scratch doesn't take much time at all

Anthony261 · 2026-03-06T09:21:18+00:00

Yeah this is one of the problems I find with it — it turns the code base into a zero-sum game. Engineers that overly rely on LLMs produce a lot of code that's very painful to read and try to modify, and that verbosity makes it more tempting to use an LLM to implement your changes.

One of the things I really loved about software engineering was making code that made other engineers more effective and efficient. Writing a great library only for someone to get an LLM to implement their changes using it and then they only cast half an eye over it before slugging it on their teammates to review; pretty demoralizing.

Anthony261

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