Predicting the future isn't about being right tomorrow, it's about selling you something today. - read that somewhere

Folks using AI aren't interested in the future, they are interested in buying today and maximizing profits today. If something goes wrong tomorrow, then that's when the problems are dealt with: tomorrow.

AI is an incredibly fragile technology, as you say, it's depended on so many things going right, amazing stuff that it works at all. That fragility includes price, once that goes up and developer price goes down, the winds of change might blow again.

AI also forces folks to be online to code, without being online, companies cannot extend their products. Git was the first version (open source) control system that worked offline. We're literally turning back the hands of time with AI.

AI is another vendor lock-in with the big providers being the sole key-holders to the gates of coding heaven. Folks are blindly running into the hands of vendors who will raise prices as soon as their investors demand their money back.

AI is "improving" code bases to make subtle errors and edge cases harder to detect debugging without using AI will be impossible. Will a human developer actually be able to understand a code base that has been coded up by an AI? That's a problem for tomorrow, today we're making the profits and pumping up the shareholder value.

AI prompts are depended on versions of LLMs - change the LLM and the prompt might will generate different code. Upgrade LLMs or change prompts and suddenly generated code degrades without warning. But prompts are single-use one-way technology: once the generated code is in the code base, there is no need for the prompt - so that's non-issue, only for auditors.

Having come from levers, to punch cards, to transistors, to keyboards, to mice and finally AI, programming has fundamentally forgotten there is a second dimension. Most fields have moved to visual representation of data - graphs, photos, images, plans etc. Programming is fundamentally a single dimension activity with lines and lines of algorithmic code. Hard to understand and harder to visualize (see UML). Now AI comes along and entrenches this dependency on text-based programming, as if the keyboard is the single most (and only) important tool for programming.

It's a lack of imagine of exploring alternatives for programming that has lead us here. Having non-understandable AI tools generating subtly failing code that we blindly deploy to our servers is not an approach that promises look term stability.

Tim Davis – Probabilistic engineering and the 24-7 employee