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I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid

joshtronic.com62 points43 comments
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A tech professional recounts moving from eager early-adopter to skeptical skeptic after years of heavy AI use. Early enthusiasm included championing GitHub Copilot for an engineering team, building autonomous agents to run side projects, and relying on AI to draft emails and do repetitive tasks. That zeal was reinforced by workplace pressure - colleagues urging others to “drink the Kool-Aid” - and personal experiments that tested how far machine autonomy could replace human labor when the risk felt low. The piece includes small concrete details: loyalty to throwaway domains for testing, AI-crafted outreach that prompted human follow-up, and the odd nostalgia of a discarded Tootsie Roll bank.

A single conversation with a visibly exhausted human forced a reappraisal: automation is producing efficiency but also eroding human contact and mental bandwidth. The writer describes everyday signs - unacknowledged greetings, delivery culture, bland resumes, LinkedIn posts getting impressions but no replies - as evidence of a “dead Internet” populated by agents. In response, he’s dialing back the cultish faith in AI, reconnecting with people, rediscovering creative juice and joy, and treating tools as useful but not defining. He hasn’t renounced AI outright but has shifted priorities toward human engagement and presence.

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