I just got off the phone with my bank, wasting about 30 minutes of my ever-shortening life to be told that I need not worry about the email that came in this morning and nearly gave me a heart attack.
Opening my email inbox this morning, I see two emails about my address and information being updated from my bank. It explicitly says that if I did not make this change to call them immediately. My first thought is that it’s a phishing email, but the phone number on the email and the from: address line up, so nope.
I call in to be greeted by their automated bot that tries first to get me to go online and change my info, then abruptly hangs up on me. I call back and am put on hold for ~15 minutes to talk to an agent.
Upon getting a hold of a human being, I verify the account and then sit back to have her check the info, only to say “nothing to worry about, it was a ‘system update’ on our end.”
So, you sent out an urgent email to God knows how many clients, wasting not only our time, but your call center people’s time. Insanity.
Over the past week, we’ve placed two orders through Amazon (we’re new parents and needed baby wipes, for the anti-AMZN crowd) - only to have the items still be in our cart the next day and the order not go through. Now, this could be new-parent lack of sleep, but both of us swear we hit the order button and saw the confirmation screen. Amazon has admitted to vibe coding as much as possible, so I think it’s the former rather than the latter.
We are running headfirst into a world where everything is honestly just worse.
The Greybeards are retiring instead of debugging LLM output, taking all their knowledge out of the workforce, only to create a vacuum that can never be filled by juniors and those that don’t care (probably 70%+ of those in tech). It is literally impossible to debug the amount of generated code that LLMs can output. Opensource projects are closing their doors to contributions, but we’re going somewhere very quickly!
This post is just an ad hoc rant about enshittification, I don’t know where else I am going with it.
Disclaimer: I don’t actually know if my bank is “vibe-coding”, as this error could still happen years ago before LLMs, but the time wastage is the same, and we all know how this is going to go in the coming years with further adoption of “AI”.
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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