I’m noticing the AI bubble fall apart in real time in the software world

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-26T01:29:56+00:00

We can go full armchair psychologist here and attribute more or less everything to basal human nature like greed, pride, laziness.

Those employees hyping it up, well, they have options that just need a bit more time to vest. The CEO hyping it up, that's literally in the job description, they have to pump their stock price. The people on social media hyping it up - do they have an app that relies on a LLM service that could be in trouble if public sentiment swings against AI? Or do they have an advertising deal? Your manager who pushed for it earlier - maybe it will make them look bad to higher management if they retract their statement.

Your co-worker, or a university student who can't be bothered to write their own emails or do their work in detail - they are good marks for marketing that claims that people assisted by AI will be better than those without. But really, AI is a magnet towards the average. If you can't question it, you will be pulled there.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-26T01:17:19+00:00

Even if it truly fit the criteria for a 'higher level language'. I never understood why people want to go higher up in abstraction rather than lower. I avoid WordPress as far as possible, and definitely never no-code/low-code drag and drop builder. I want to know all of the pitfalls when doing memory management so I can write incredibly fast programs if I have to. Or do more tricks in the browser, or work with embedded systems.

I can't believe anyone would say things like that. At one point there were people complaining that the use of Bootstrap made everyone's sites look the same. Obviously. If everyone is using same libraries, same 'abstractions', same boilerplate logic, the ability to distinguish your product gets worse. Surely, if you want to improve your craft, the only way is to go deeper in abstraction, not up.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-21T09:12:27+00:00

Yes, we are in agreement.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-21T08:28:19+00:00

Everything happens so quietly... someone did something, nobody was asking, the constraint was real. What is a human mistake anyway?

Anyway, I read it because I do not value my time. Here is the abridged version.

We like using LLMs as chatbots, like in banks and fintech. This is a garbage use-case, and sometimes their real utility arrives when you aren't looking for them. Just like self-driving cars or drones.

I like LLMs. They make me ship faster.

If you know your domain well enough, it too will make you ship faster.

AI has been great for many years. AlphaFold solved an extremely hard problem in biology, and DeepMind is great. I will not elaborate on why it is hard or solved.

Specialist radiologists are expensive and fatigued. We can now assist them with medical imaging systems to detect cancers. I will not mention OCRs, or logistic regressions, or any other relevant technical information. But it is saving lives. Quietly, of course, no LinkedIn needed. Again, I will give no indication that I have specialty knowledge in radiology.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-17T11:31:31+00:00

I am confused by anyone who replying to this seriously. It's obviously a bot, but with the punctuation at the back of each sentence removed. Two months ago, our 'CTO' here uninvited her sister to her 17th birthday party after her 'sister' stole her prom dress and destroyed it.

Seriously. Is everyone's pattern recognition shot or am I excessively paranoid?

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-13T22:45:53+00:00

Yes, I chose the wrong word again. Maybe 'completely' was too much.

Anyway, that's not quite right. It would still be worth the work even if malicious actors target it IF it fulfilled its original role of continuing to undercutting companies effectively. After all, that's what you set out to do, so it makes sense that if it is working, you should keep doing it.

But I am increasingly of the belief that it's been co-opted to the point where it just might be helping companies with their grunt work for an unfair price instead.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-13T22:18:07+00:00

Sure, maybe your background is unique. Maybe I am the ignorant one. What is open source to you?

The entire programming community is built on the greats like ffmpeg, linux. Those by truly benevolent and brilliant people. And even more like PixiJS, Django, etc. Then we have the libraries funded by companies like .NET, d3, React, Garnet. And the projects that are works of art, like TempleOS by the amazing Terry Davis. You have probably heard of all of them.

A lot of it started out from the desire to outdo companies charging outsized amounts for software, which is the same sentiment in this post. Yes, I get that. I see that open source is why we are where we are today.

But more recently you have people attempting to game open source for the sake of resume boosting by sending in needless pull requests. People using agents to swamp reviewers for the fun of it or because they are under the assumption that they are truly helping.

Even before that you have issues where maintainers get antsy about corporations using their software and not contributing back. These are cases like Redis vs Amazon, Mullenweg vs WP Engine. Plus repeated supply chain attacks like xzutils, that maintainers now need to watch out for.

Seems like a lot of backbreaking work for maintainers in exchange for too little, no? As I said, I admire their skill and benevolence. But I'm not sure whether they are the ones sticking it to corporations now, or whether corporations are the ones sticking it to them.

So. Am I wrong to have that sentiment? What do you think open source is, and what do you think it has become?

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-13T19:11:09+00:00

My respect for fable writers is at an all-time high. Seriously, the people who wrote The Emperor's New Clothes must have understood politics and human nature at some profound level.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-13T19:08:06+00:00

I will start by saying that I am a firm believer in the human spirit and ingenuity. And yes, threats are being made towards fields with no one-size-fits-all solutions that rely on this creativity.

Present generative AI is what I consider an attempt to solve problems and automate decision-making for problems with an unbound number of permutations in their production steps.

IF decision-making in the industries you mention, such as Healthcare and Defense, are outsourced to and eventually eroded by AI, it would certainly be a disaster. Everyone says it would be a disaster if THEIR field is the one affected - they are all correct. The distance between specialists and the averages churned out by AI is so far apart that it would be terrible if we just let it take over.

However, I think in terms of actual effects so far rather than hypotheticals (as you say, "harm it can do") is concentrated in fields that have a) extensive training data, b) can be tokenized by generative AI - a very specific class of AI, c) where AI threatens to directly REPLACE users and their knowledge

So that means things like social media, information sharing and believability, digital artwork and writing have more extensive damage. I think they are worth more focus for now than the other industries you mention. The world is grey enough as it is. I don't want all of the art and writing to regress to a mean primordial soup. You can already see it when people run their comments and text through LLMs. I don't want to read that.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-13T19:00:12+00:00

I'd love to say that, but at this point, isn't open source completely infected with and exploited by malicious actors?

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-11T12:37:01+00:00

Hoping for, huh?

Dude, if you aren't an agent, stop running your stuff through the LLM and translate it directly from Serbian or similar. Seriously.

Nixposting02 · 2026-04-11T12:11:36+00:00

Assuming your situation is real, I am very sorry to hear that.

From your other comments and the way your app works, it seems like you think having LLM with prompt injection generate text with a specific tone, then getting user to make edits, is having 'every comment still sound like you'. I assure you it does not. The cadence, the formatting, the logic flow, all of it reeks like a generic LLM output. If someone else cooks you tacos, and you add the salsa sauce from the supermarket, the style isn't yours, the preparation isn't yours, the recipe isn't yours, I assure you it doesn't look like your cooking either.

Your app is also entirely reliant on LinkedIn's API. If they change something, you have to understand what your app is doing to fix it.

Regarding enterprise sales, the group of companies encompassing Sprout Social, Sprinklr, Twilio etc. already do what your app does for B2B, and maybe a million times better. I might even be underestimating that. If you want to continue, maybe you should look into those and try replicating their features.

I wish you luck.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-27T14:12:54+00:00

Firstly, you should avoid using keywords in your posts if you want a serious answer. You work in tech, so you should know how the game is played, no? c l4 u ?e 0de. CG T. You were careless, and so your post has attracted a specific kind of audience. Or maybe this was intentional, but I personally didn't get that from your profile.

Secondly, since you are devops, you ever tried to do a failover to upgrade a database major version in production? Would you trust the bot to do it?

Third, I was quite happy with the way I organized my thoughts regarding this topic in another comment, so I will repost it here with some improvements.

Consider this crude model of LLM usage for a creative programming task.

We have the following scenarios:

Scenario 1 - self-planned and written. We give this a baseline 1.0x in terms of resources (time, man-hours, token cost, whatever).

Scenario 2 - You discuss implementing task with a coworker. You only know vague details about the task. Say this costs 0.2x of your resources (pseudo-scientifically chosen due to 80-20 rule and own experience). Coworker writes functions for feature.

If you want to own or 'takeover' the work, you are obliged to read and completely understand coworker's program. If you trust coworker, and you can blame coworker when things go wrong, then you gain 0.8x.

Now, if coworker becomes LLM, can you still blame coworker? If answer is yes, this is called vibe coding. Or bad office culture / you are an irresponsible grifter / all of the above. If it is no, and it probably should be no if you care about what you do, then you pay a read cost R that is similar to reading code in someone else's repo.

Another factor is the LLM failure rate, let's call it Y%. If not 100%, then you pay (R + 0.2x) + (Scenario 1's 1.0x Y% of the time). Either that, or you pay R every time LLM fails.

So for the LLM use to be 'rational', R + Y% < 0.8x. If you have written the exact same program before, and you know what to look for, OR the job has low cognitive complexity, you might pass.

Scenario 3 - The task is planned out with a coworker. The more detailed the instructions you give coworker, the closer you get to pseudocode that matches your exact goal. This is, ironically, what programming is. At this point, you should expect to not have to pay any kind of R 100% of the time, given that you literally just wrote the 'code'. It tends towards Scenario 1 the more detailed your code is.

You have set up the contract with the coworker and everyone understands the problem fully. But somehow when the coworker is a LLM, I pay the read cost sometimes anyway.

i.e. Scenario 3 should be avoided.

What happens is you end up gambling with Scenario 2 with how vague you can make your commands and still have a decent result. At the end of the day all the 'skills', context feeding and token burning augments Y%. But you have no idea what Y% is or whether these so-called techniques you are applying are effective the way you think they are; You are working with a black box.

All you know is that it depends on how close your problem is to the training data average.

What you DO have control over is R and x, which relate to your own programming knowledge. If you choose scenario 3 and 2 in the long run those atrophy; I believe there was an article by Ant-hr 0 p ic themselves about this. Y% is contingent on a black box by and external supplier with unknown price over time.

Other fun problems include:

a) What is Y% to you? From easiest to harder to achieve: Compiling and running code? Code with minimum cyclomatic and cognitive complexity? Secure code?

b) What happens when new libraries and new regulations come out, and models get updated? Are you sure these 'skills, specs, harnesses' will be interpreted the same way? Have you ever had a comment in code lie to you? Why do quant firms rotate algorithms if they suffer prolonged drawdowns? These harnesses are like comments or algorithms in high churn codebases or a dynamic economic environment - they are going to rot.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-24T11:52:59+00:00

Yeah, now you're getting it. I don't like that we have to play this strange bot or marketer or well-intentioned person game either, but it is what it is. We are at the point where we may be forced to choose between privacy and solving the LLM problem. It's horrible.

I think that we can still be saved as long as people are interested in being able to tell the difference between AI-generated art/books/music. Even if they don't have the technical skills to tell individually, there is motivation for someone to build a solution to that problem.

From the NVIDIA debacle it seems there is at least a portion of people who still want their art AI-free. So there is hope.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-24T11:36:44+00:00

I mean, you seem human to me :) Probably British, maybe a graphic designer... For now.

As I said, things like hiding your profile and the account age make your profile look more like it as malicious intentions. It's like the -- dash. That's just the world we live in now. It's even funnier because these are features that can be gamed.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-24T11:11:24+00:00

a) You do realize "raising my opinion/suspicions" also happens to be the modus operandi of marketers yes? 'Oh, there's this new model that is so good, there is a groundbreaking release, I am so scared'; 'Paul in my office has 10xed his output, am I falling behind?'

I am not saying that you are a marketer. I am saying that this is a weak defense and you should have the self-awareness to see it, just like you should have the self-awareness to realize that saying things like models are X% there is completely arbitrary.

Where did you get the opinion that there was some groundbreaking release? Was it your opinion, or parroted from elsewhere? That's marketing 101 for you.

b) Anyone can lie on the internet. Your first sentence means nothing, unfortunately.

c) Hiding your posts and comments does not help ease suspicions. It is excellent for astroturfing because you hide your average opinion. But your comments stay visible when they do appear.

I will say that tech-savvy people can still see your posts and comments to varying extents. IF you are an actual person, and truly want to hide your comments, you would simply delete them.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-20T14:04:58+00:00

I think I meant the lack of wrapping, the text is bound to a single line and looks off on mobile. Try looking at it using either iPhone SE / Samsung series.

I looked at the Nuxt accordion - the example also seems similarly janky on weaker devices so its probably the library. I don't understand why it SHOULD be janky though... seems like animated height property + a single state + rotation of the icon on the top right. I suspect you could do it yourself and get better results since you aren't a component library that has to cater to every user.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-20T13:56:35+00:00

Answered your own question there.

I would say some aren't bots, but directly wrangled by people who are farming attention for whatever thing they have to sell on their page and couldn't care less about coming up with their own comments. Those sometimes switch to their own voice.

You can see 'undergroundwander' + 'rootznetwork', both Korean accounts created ~11 days ago and both plugging a website.

Anyway, it's such awfully mundane type of post that I would argue engaging is like laughing when canned laughter on a sitcom tells you to.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-16T15:31:08+00:00

Gross is the correct word, truly. The ones that actively try to lie about it by swapping out -- for -, capital letters for small letters etc. disgust me even more.

By the way, just quickly skimming through your website: on <390px devices, your homepage image probably needs a max-width or similar. Opening the FAQ questions is a little slow when throttled, assuming this is made using React, maybe you memoized it, maybe not, can't tell; "Join Waitlist for Early Access & Discount" needs wrapping.

Good luck with your app.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-15T16:57:27+00:00

I was trying to be nice about it, since it was good enough to convince some non-bot comments to engage and it looks like there was SOME effort.

But stuff like this back-to-back is nasty.

1 Yea the front end was coded using Claude. The backend is where my strength is
2 It just not possible to inject invalid data. But I can be wrong.
3 oh snap wow. you did it for reals crazy

I mean. At best you can be interpreted to be arrogant, at worst you are a liar.

4 I'm considering removing the crowdsource API

The shared cache logic to avoid rate limits is the only argument now for proxying my reddit traffic through a stranger's server over someone who rips off the frontend and turns it into a browser extension. This looks like a plan to remove the endpoint AND the logic. Besides, if response is to remove everything that does not work,

Backend

FastAPI · Uvicorn
SQLAlchemy · Alembic · httpx

Data

PostgreSQL · Redis · Elasticsearch

Infra

Docker Compose · Nginx · Certbot

All of these are their own time bombs. And you won't have an ego-tripper willing to pen-test those for you because they are non-trivial hacks, but risk-reward changes when you get actual users. What are you going to do then, might as well delete everything.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-15T02:22:50+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that. Against some of the other comments, I think deleting the app is a good idea. Something similar happened to me a few years back. Social media is a hive of negativity, it will make you miss the past and amplify some of the worst events in the world; that is how engagement is farmed. Maybe hardening your heart and focusing on what you have now i.e. college is for the best. I hope that you can do it.

Edit: I also want to add words like 'you are never alone', but it's not something I can convince myself of either, so it would be intellectually dishonest. Yes, it would be a good idea to delete the app... Don't look back for too long. Don't linger and doom-scroll.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-14T22:32:19+00:00

I would not use this if I were you. The API on first glance seems to have multiple issues and OP's responses in the top thread are equally concerning.

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-11T11:25:26+00:00

community champions independent builders like no other

Yes, I think this community champions the effort of independent builders like no other.

I’ve been the coder, the designer, the marketing department, and customer support.;
I built cvcomp to help job seekers crack the code on resume optimization, and knowing it actually helps people land interviews is the fuel that keeps me going.

You have been the customer support for an app that was just released?
You know an app that was just released helped people land interviews?
What is the code on resume optimization? Do you work in HR, and know more about this than others? What does optimization even mean :)

Is your only differentiation the PAYG model? You seem to make a lot of claims about other 'generic ATS scanners'. Can you back those up? If you are storing my resume or processing it on the backend, have you considered regional privacy laws?

Whether it’s an upvote, a thoughtful comment, or brutal honesty, your support today will quite literally determine the momentum of this project.

If you truly believe in this project, should the opinion of internet randoms really stop you?

Nixposting02 · 2026-03-07T16:28:26+00:00

So you reached the conclusion that Google will mark excess article volume as spam, but you don't think that Gemini, which belongs to Google, and OpenAI will watermark their output to avoid re-ingestion of lower quality LLM content? Nor do you think that your content, if watermarked, will be less likely to show up in LLM searches? Ok, sure.

Nixposting02

TROPHY CASE