I got this email:

Rich,

Your creation of Clojure …

sycophantic blather worthy of a third grader's homework assignment to write a letter to a public figure you don't know, using sources you don't understand, to express an emotion unfelt, with no intention whatsoever

Claude Haiku 4.5

Ah, Christmas time. That time of year when our hearts are warmed by the best wishes of an idiot robot. All tingly from the experience, and in the holiday spirit, I thought I’d write my own letter of thanks to those bringing us this next generation of ‘AI’.

How shall I thank thee, let me count the ways:

Should I thank you for pirating the entire historical output of creative humanity and then asserting ownership of your loot?

For destroying education?

For raising utility rates and killing the environment?

For wasting vast quantities of developer time trying to coax some useful output from your BS generators, time which could instead be used communicating to interns and entry-level devs who, being actually intelligent, could learn from what they are told, and maintain what they make?

For eliminating entry-level jobs, and thus the path to experience, ensuring future generations of unskilled, unemployable people?

For giving me a fake person to talk to when I need support instead of an actual person who understands what I’m saying, can help me faster, and has a chance of caring?

For replacing search results with summary BS?

For providing the tools to fill the internet with slop, making actual human content almost impossible to find?

For enticing CEOs with the promise to save some fraction of a percent on personnel costs, not actually be any faster, cutting off their future labor pool while only experiencing a modest to severe reduction in product quality, integrity and customer satisfaction (tradeoffs they are apparently eager to make)?

For replacing musical expression with the sounds of robot parrots chirping?

For adding an ‘AI’ feature to every flipping thing, most such features requiring a deep invasion of privacy?

For running the second biggest and most damaging con of this century (running hard at first)?

I think not.

This email was a reminder that agentic ‘AI’ is sure to flood the remainder of human communication channels with BS, swamping many services, and making every interaction with people not in the same room suspect, and filtering it a time-consuming waste, forever.

When did we stop considering things failures that create more problems than they solve?