I suppose I wasn't clear, when I said they are dutifully generating code, I mean they *are* using the AI tools. So the leadership is left with the possibilities that either AI isn't fit for the task of suddenly halving their headcount without any transition plan or the employees are to blame, and so they are deciding the employees are to blame.

The leadership cut entire teams and then just assigned their projects to the other half who had never seen the codebase, never used or talked to users of those projects, no knowledge associated with meetings and emails and instant messages, only tickets and a codebase to go on. AI was the stated answer as to why not only could they double the workload, they could AI-away the traditional need for typical transition efforts.

The trend even in theory doesn't seem to keep pace with the depreciation on the assets.

My subjective experience is opposite, after an initial rapid improvement in LLM behavior, the subjective experience has plateaued. Doing a better job with getting the right stuff into context without having to manually stuff it with certain tools, and that counts for a lot, but given the same context the outputs are about as unreliable as they have been, including gemini 3. If it generates too much code, then it's more trouble to fix that code than it's worth. Digestable snippets are useful... sometimes to save on tedium, but the investment seems to expect to just replace people, and it's not going to be there from what I see.

And the marketing has been obnoxious, pretty much going back to GPT3 I keep seeing some advocates saying "It can write your code for you!" followed with the next iteration of "well, admittedly, it couldn't before, but *now* it can!" GPT4, Claude, Gemini, I keep seeing the claims and then dismissing the previous claim to say "this time it's true!". This is starting to really impact companies, I know of a company that laid off over half their developers without any warning or prep, with execs telling the remaining people "you can just use AI to maintain and improve the code, it's going to be no incremental burden". They seem very disappointed that a bunch of things have stopped happening and have been saying the devs must be some sort of luddites refusing to use AI to just do the work, even as they are dutifully generating code.

Historically speaking, that last part is frequently elusive. Lots of crashing and burning of once "sure thing" tech companies. Some have survived, but it's hardly an assumption that can be made.

... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.

Reminds me of when an executive left our company and higher ups were rushing to assure us that we shouldn't be too worried and don't let this hurt morale while mostly we either didn't care or were kind of glad to see the idiot go. Meanwhile the execs speaking would get obviously angry at the guy for betraying them and leaving.

It was clear that day that the executives actually think we give a crap about any one of them.

Not knowing anything at all about Apple and Dye and Lemay, the story seems depressingly familiar and totally believable based on my experience with big companies.

Someone useless occupies a high position because he convinces peers he is somehow insightful, everyone hates him for his crappy 'leadership', his departure pisses off the leadership team so much that all his allies are dead to them.... Yep, all of this absolutely looks like things I've seen at other companies...

Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.

Nope, they are going the other way. There's a proposal to dramatically increase residential power rates, in part to fund the 'increased demand due to datacenters". They want residents to pay for stuff instead of making those poor, cash-strapped AI companies have to pay for what they are inflicting...

Not a weirdo, and it's all about their business interests against the users.

A user increasingly keeps their device over a longer term, 8 year old devices are common. Between their needs not evolving and to the extent they are, they focus on their phones. As a result, Microsoft gets thrown a few dollars by the OEM when the device sold, and that's it.

Meanwhile, if they get someone into a microsoft account, they can upsell them on subscriptions to office and onedrive, and easily make more money per user per year than they made from many of those users over a decade.

Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.

That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.

I guess "vibe-something" is going to be the anti-word of 2026. People are slowly waking up to what it actually means to let the AI do the work.

I'm not dissing AI, I'm using it extensively myself and there's a few AI whitepapers with my name on them. But like any tool, it can be great when used correctly and ruin your day when not.

That doesn't mean what they do is automatically legal.

I'm pretty sure there's a demand for "murder my husband", or for "can someone please drown my neighbour". And yet it's illegal to offer such services.

Also: Voters. Smokers are still a fairly substantial fraction of the population, enough to swing a vote, especially if, and that appears to be the trend in most western democracies these days, there are two opposing political sides roughly evenly matched.

I mean, does it not strike anyone as a very weird coincidence that we have almost perfect 50/50 splits in so many countries?