Just another form of vendor lock-in. If your business model is mostly/entirely dependent on an external party, that should be a well understood risk.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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I am responsible for gathering information on AI to determine whether we should use it for our next project. The ask was to use it for a critical process task. Immediately in my head I was like "no, we are not using AI at all", but I obviously need quantifiable data. This is just another thing to add to my list of why using AI for core processes is one of the stupidest things you could ever do.
The only people winning are selling shovels
Dude, it's 2026. We don't sell shovels, we sell shovel subscriptions.
Or rather the right to use shovels under ToS that can be changed on a whim.
And you can sell at least one shovel to somebody digging themselves into a hole
60 employees who can’t be productive without AI?
And this is progress?
My company is pivoting hard to Claude for everything, and besides the fact that it's irritating as fuck to use, it has me worried about shenanigans like in this article. For almost 50 years, they've had a "no reliance upon 3rd party platforms for core functions," but since they hired an AI apologist to the C-suite, all that has gone out the window in a matter of months.
Got me thinking I should warm up my resume...
Your point is well-taken, but this is also exactly why AI reliance is dangerous. Anyone who sees this should realize the precarity of relying on products that can just be locked away from you.
Windows 11, Onedrive, Intel Management Engine, Google accounts, ...
It's not that they can't be productive. Right now at least, what AI does is amplify how much work you can do. One of my friends codes for a big company that uses state of the art Claude models and he says that the system does 80-90% of the coding grunt work and the job is more of an editor and making sure everything is correctly annotated so that humans can understand what's happening in the code in the future. This means that work that might have taken months he can complete in a week or two.
This approach to coding is exactly what creates the problem. They will find out the hard way if they can continue to be productive when something breaks and AI is not available for whatever reason. Does anyone know how to fix it? Is the documentation sufficient to understand what the AI did?
My friend said early AI iterations were really bad at being opaque and that even now if you're having it design the core architecture you're going to have the problems you mentioned. But his job has basically changed to being focused mostly on being that architect. Using the metaphor of constructing a building. He used to have to do a lot of manual labor too, not just be an architect. Now he just has to tell the AI system what to build AND how. But the majority of the actual "construction" work is done by the AI system.
To continue with the analogy though, how many architects create things that an engineer takes one look at and laughs at because it’s structurally impossible (hint: a lot). Knowing the deep parts of the code and how it works becomes even more invaluable otherwise you risk Chinese building practices (quick, looks good, falls apart quickly).
Eh consider it like a power outage. These corporations don't deserve more than automated slop. If that system is down, it's an earned break
Regardless of the fact that work has ground to a halt the CEO will continue to claim productivity has never been higher since implementing AI
Fucking hilarious that the "best" chatbot can't even manage a decent support chatbot...
Because it doesn't work 🤣. I can think of maybe once in my life where a chat bot was able to answer my question.
decent support chatbot
is an oxymoron.
Salesforce recently got rid of their "crate a case" form and replaced it with a chat bot to do the exact same thing. Of course it tries to talk you out of creating a case first, but will begrudgingly create one eventually. It's one of the most asinine uses for a chat bot I've ever seen.
Anthropic is like tough tiddies the US government is doing the same shit to us.