Artificial intelligence is all around us, and at times it's no worse than the natural kind, even. Which means what? The psyche of people doing intellectual work can't take it, and they start explaining to themselves, and then to everyone around, why the AI thingy is dumb. Let me offer a few pieces of harmful advice — and even debunk some of them.
Tip 1: Always use weak models — you know, like, but hey, I run it locally on my old lady 1050 Ti and pay nobody, and the electricity is free. As a result you'll catch hallucinations even on a trivial task and will proudly argue that the AI thingy doesn't understand a thing, while I, as a matter of fact, solved the problem in my head.
Tip 2: Become a DeepSeek fanboy. The Chinese, they say, are ahead of the whole planet, and I even managed to vibe-code a sorting algorithm with this little distill. Then again, I could have written that myself in five minutes. All in all, the AI thingy is, like, slightly faster.
Tip 3: Try to hammer nails with a phone: ask the AI thingy to do what it's not built for — say, ask it to add up 20 numbers and never, ever let it write code to solve that problem: like, come on, do it yourself. And of course don't feed it any MCPs: back in my day, you know, there were no such freebies, so what can you do without help, huh? Come on.
Tip 4: Declare everyone who uses the AI thingy talentless. Like, well, anyone could do it with Claude, you try it without. You just don't distinguish using AI for creation from using it to shed routine. And you know why? Because routine is exactly where you're strong, and that's exactly where AI competes with you — and doesn't lose, either. It used to be you could bury a creator under routine and laugh watching them flounder; now they can create, while the routine rests on AI's shoulders.
Tip 5: Start a conversation about global warming. The AI thingy, they say, guzzles so much that the glaciers will soon melt. Yes, there is such a problemlet, though that's not why the glaciers are melting; but even if it were, that turn of events has nothing to do with the AI thingy being no competitor — the technology just needs tightening up, and we need to switch to clean energy sources.
Tip 6: Send your family and friends stories about how a bunch of workers got laid off because of AI and were left without income. With a straight face, believing it's AI's fault and that we ought to start fighting it, like back in 2029 with Skynet.
Recognize yourself? I did — and I made my choice. If we can't stop it, let's lead it. I crossbred myself with the AI thingy, learned how to cook it and how to squeeze the maximum use out of it on routine tasks.
And I can't help quoting Linus Torvalds on AI, loosely: "AI is just a new tool, and if you tell me that 99% of your code is written with AI, then I'll tell you that 100% of your code is written by compilers" — which, let me add, were once a breakthrough too.
For the record, I disagree with Linus.