AI Crapification
If GenAI doesn't improve it's quality, it's eating it's own future.
Marc Andreessen once said software was eating the world.
Maybe. Once upon a time. Now, it’s AI slop. And it is not nibbling around the edges. It is devouring everything with the grace of a raccoon in a dumpster.
You have seen the headlines. LLMs will program everything. Tech executives high on their own hype have been sprinting to prove it. Take Brian Armstrong at Coinbase. In a move that will live in tech infamy Coinbase laid off actual engineers and proudly announced that non programmer project managers would now be writing code with AI.
The very next day? Catastrophic failure.
Let that sink in. The crypto exchange holding billions decided the future was vibe coded features slapped together by people who could not debug Hello World. Anybody still keeping serious money on Coinbase at this point is not investing. They are gambling with extra steps. When the next outage hits and it will you will have no one to blame but your own refusal to read the room.
This pattern is everywhere. Click view my hotel reservation and nothing happens. The system happily confirms it exists but the button leads to the digital equivalent of a shrug emoji. Plane tickets? Same deal. These are not edge cases. They are the new normal. Features that were clearly never tested because who needs testing when you have vibes and a prompt?
The engineers who used to say no the ones who kept the whole thing from collapsing have been marginalized reorged or fired. Now it is just PMs executives and their shiny new AI toys in the room. And do not forget the army of fake experts who could barely tell a byte from a bite whose entire expertise dates back to when ChatGPT launched.
The AI crapification is accelerating. Bugs are multiplying faster than crypto tokens in a bull market. And we are left with three possible futures.
The public just adjusts like we do with every other piece of crumbling infrastructure. Learn the workarounds when the app dies. Or miraculously the systems improve and the bugs retreat, the AI’s becoming much better. Or companies finally feel the revenue pain their customers have been screaming about and quietly bring real professionals back with AI as a tool not a pink slip factory.
Right now we are firmly on path one with occasional detours into clown world.
The backlash is here and it is delicious. AI sucks has gone from edgy whisper to open conversation. The magic is gone. The emperor is not just naked. He is generating PowerPoint slides about how his nudity is actually a feature.
Sam Altman the widely disliked face of OpenAI has become something of a tech pariah. Dario Amodei of Anthropic keeps dropping pronouncements about the glorious end of white collar, never mind if that came true nobody would be left to buy his tokens. The field sprinted into the gutter then complained when it got wet.
The heads of these AI companies are not going to be comfortable where this lands. The executives and believers who think their systems are fine are in for a hard lesson. Their bosses may be impressed by the headcount cuts and the shiny demos today but the market will have very different ideas soon enough. Customers notice when everything is broken. Revenue notices. Shareholders eventually notice.
Nobody knows exactly how this ends. Some forecasters are already pointing out that token costs will soon exceed hiring humans and humans shockingly are often better at not hallucinating. What is predictable is the trajectory: more slop more broken products more executives pretending this is fine.
The status quo is not sustainable. It is not good for users. It is not good for builders. It’s not good for firms. And eventually it will not be good for the balance sheets either.
Enjoy the slop era while it lasts. Just do not say nobody warned you.