> LLM marketers have succeeded at inducing collective delusion
That's the real trick & one I desperately wish I knew how to copy.
I know there's a connection to Dunning Kruger & I know that there's a dopamine effect of having a responsive artificial minion & there seems to be some of that "secret knowledge" sauce that makes cults & conspiracies so popular (there's also the promise of less effort for the same or greater productivity).
Add the list grows, I see the popularity, but I doubt I could easily apply all these qualities to anything else.
IMO algorithmically generated "social" media feeds combined with the lack of adequate mass-media alternatives have supercharged cult recruitment in the last approximately 10 years.
Stupid people in my life have been continually and recklessly joining harebrained cults for the last 5 years.
Really I think it's probably much, much easier to start a cult these days than it has ever been. Good news for tech company founders I guess, bad news for American culture, American society, and the American people.
One way to help stop it is to get off social media and stop giving these tech billionaires so much money.
The less people on social media, the less real the network effect is, the less people who join in the first place, the less money the billionaires have to throw hundreds of millions into politics, the less inadvertent cult members.
I've gotten to the point where I just leave my phone at home at this point, and it has been incredibly nice. Before that I deleted most apps that I found to be time wastes, deleted all social media (HN and two small discords are my exception).
It's very nice, I'm less stressed, I feel more in the moment, I respond to my friends when I check my phone every few hours on the speaker in the other room.
I encourage others to try it, add it to your dry January.
And ya know what I ain't doing a lick of? Sending money and reams of data to these billionaires I think are really lame individuals with corrupted moral compasses.
Now it ain't perfect, I'm sure Google's still getting reams of info about me from my old Gmail account that I still use sometimes, and Apple too from a few sources. But... getting closer!
So many folk sit here and recognize the same problems I do, the way it warps your attention, the addictiveness of the handheld devices, the social media echo chambers, the rising influence of misinformation, the lack of clarity between real and fake...
I'm up to 29.8x productivity in the first week of 2026 by continually running 12 concurrent agents, each with 3 independent sub-agents. Each third sub-agent generates new prompts for its corresponding agent by engaging with a custom-defined MCP protocol.
Mind sharing your workflow? I'm at 24.3x productivity right now, 5 parallel agents, 2 monitoring Opus agents, 1 architect agent and 2 Senior QA agents, each with independent memory and 12 MCP servers. They are running in 78 parallel tabs in ghostty.
Is their TC mainly in tokens or also in stock-tokens? Did you connect them to a Mame MCP server so they can play and rest a bit while churning out 50 PRs a day each? What is your continuity plan if they all plan to quit at once?
I am working with kilo-stock-tokens. Currently producing 3000 LoC/h (trying to ramp up to 6000 by the end of the week). I have also deployed 4 union-busting agents in case the other agents decide to quit all at once.
> It is only funny until that vibe coder is building the data warehouse that holds your data and doesn’t catch the vulnerability that leads to your data leaking.
This is unacceptable. Why would I patronize a business that hires vibe coders? I would hope their business fails if they have such pitiful security and such open disdain for their clients.
These are "AI"-addicted developers that you're talking to.
They have been tricked into a world-view which validates their continual, lazy use of high-tech auto-generators.
They have been tricked into gleefully opting in to their own deskilling.
Expecting an "AI"-addicted developer to file a bug is like expecting an MSNBC or Fox News viewer to attend a town meeting.
The goal of "AI" products is to foster laziness, dependency, and isolation in their users.
Expecting these users to take any sort of action outside of further communication with their LLM chatbots does not square with the social function of these products.
Edit (response to the guy/LLM below me):
Hackernews comments written by fearmongering LLM idiots will tell me to "keep an open mind" about dogshit LLM chatbots until the day I die.
LLM technology is garbage.
If these tools are changing the world, they're only doing so by:
1. Dramatically facilitating the promulgation of idiotic delusions
2. Making enterprise software far, far more vulnerable than it was even in the recent past
this is a lazy take. all software has bugs and defects.
part of what we do, as developers is to learn. to have an open mind to new tools and technologies.
these tools are… different, they’re changing the world (fast), and worth trying to understand. your mental rigidity to doing things “the right way” will hold you back and limit your growth. the world is changing. are you?
Those tools are massively overhyped and hemorrhaging money by the second. Such a shame so many people are so blind as to not be able to take things with some realism and a non biased POV. They're great, yeah, they help for a lot of things, some people really "vibe" with that kind of workflow, good for them.
Everytime you "prompt" and you "vibe" you're not "changing with the world", you're using copious amounts of energy on very expensive hardware that you would never, in your lifetime, would be able to use if it wasn't backed by trillions in VC funding. Don't believe me? Try to match the performance of a current model with local hardware, report back with how much that costs in hardware and energy.
They're all in the stage A of enshittification, the bait phase. You're willingly making yourself reliant on a tool that eventually will be uncostable for any individual, and only affordable for big orgs.
If the job of a developer is to "learn, and have an open mind to new tools and technologies", and "my mental rigidity to doing things "the right way" will hold me back and limit my growth", then I don't want to be an engineer. Because one thing is to experiment, and another one is to, pardon the expression, suck off any new technology as the new epitome of anything. I don't want to be a "developer" with no criteria. Call me an engineer instead, I do things "the right way", and I don't fall prey to fashion under the guise of "growth".
Attending council meetings as a citizen observer is a huge waste of your time. The council already knows how it’s going to vote. The whole public-facing legislative process is community theater.
