"every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon."
They're token predictors. This is inherently a limited technology, which is optimized for making people feel good about interacting with it.
There may be future AI technologies which are not just token predictors, and will have different capabilities. Or maybe there won't be. But when we talk about AI these days, we're talking about a technology with a skill ceiling.
I'm starting to see a new genre of post here in the AI bubble, where people go to topics that aren't about AI at all, and comment something like, "this doesn't matter because it's not AI". This is the third I've seen in a week.
Benji Edwards was, is, and will continue to be, a good guy. He's just exhibiting a (hopefully) temporary over-reliance on AI tools that aren't up to the task. Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.
> He's just exhibiting a (hopefully) temporary over-reliance on AI tools that aren't up to the task. Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.
Technically yes, any of us could neglect the core duties of our job and outsource it to a known-flawed operator and hope that nobody notices.
But that doesn't minimize the severity of what was done here. Ensuring accurate and honest reporting is the core of a journalist's job. This author wasn't doing that at all.
This isn't an "any one of us" issue because we don't have a platform on a major news website. When people in positions like this drop the ball on their jobs, it's important to hold them accountable.
I feel bad for the guy, but.. a journalist in tech whose beat is AI should know much better. I'd be a lot more forgiving if this was like a small publication by someone that didn't follow AI.
lol this feels a little bit suspect to me.
"i was sick, i was rushing to a deadline!"
im not saying the guy should lose his journalist license and have to turn in his badge and pen but seems like a bit of a flimsy excuse meant to make us forgive him.
hope hes feeling better soon!
Not proof reading quotes you've dispatched to be fetched by an AI ignoring that said website has blocked LLM scraping and hence your quotes are made up?
For a senior tech writer?
Come on, man.
> Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.
No, no not any of us.
And, as Benji will know himself, certainly not if accuracy is paramount.
Journalistic integrity - especially when quoting someone - is too valuable to be rooted in AI tools.
Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us.
Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.
I mean, I find that LLMs are quite good with Lisp (Clojure) and I really like the abstraction levels that it provides. Pure functions and immutable data mean great boundary points and strong guarantees to reason about my programs, even if a large chunk of the boring parts are auto-coded.
I think there's lots of people like me, it's just that doing real dev work is orthogonal (possibly even opposed) to participating in the AI hype cycle.
I'm not an AI "advocate". I'm telling y'all about how the world is. How it's going to be. I'm not happy about it, but we've crossed the threshold beyond which it's incomprehensibly silly not to factor the massive changes LLMs bring into how you work designing or implementing software. Lisp apps are cool, but as of 2026 they're fading into irrelevance. The paradigm of programming they represent is bound for the Computer History Museum and Usagi Electric's YouTube channel—not the reality of new software development. Even a legacy code base can be poured into an LLM, which will grok it instantly, answer your questions about it, and propose changes and improvements that will make it more performant, reliable, and comprehensible. I know this because I've done it.
> I'm not an AI "advocate". I'm telling y'all about how the world is. How it's going to be.
This, together with grand claims that obviously don't hold up in reality, does make you an AI advocate no matter how much you dislike the label.
If you comment was more measured and had nuanced view, then I'd understand wanting to push back on it. But then you also say stuff like "Even a legacy code base can be poured into an LLM, which will grok it instantly" so no wonder others see you as a AI advocate.
I don't agree. That may be your experience, but it is annoying to have someone act as a prophet for all things and disregard what everyone else says. Emacs is still relevant in my daily work even with heavy use of LLMs.
What would a "legitimate competitor" look like to you?
Samsung and LG make high-end phones, and there are plenty of good personal computer vendors. And Windows is certainly a desktop OS that some people choose.
Apple doesn't offer any services unique to itself. It does offer a slick-looking and well-marketed "ecosystem" which is really just a bunch of different things that you could get from other vendors.
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