It's pretty much a vibe coding issue. What you describe I can recall being advocated forevet, the project manager's dtram that you model and spec things out enough and perfectly model the world in your test cases, then you are golden. Except the world has never been so convenient and you bank on the programming being reasonably workable by people to compensate.

Problem is people who think they can replace understanding with vibe coding. If you can only vibe code, you will end up with problems you cannot fix and the LLM can't either. If you can fix the problems, then you are not inclined to toss overly long chunks of LLM stuff because they generate ugly hard to maintain code that tends to violate all sorts of best practices for programming.

Vibe coding is a self perpetuating feedback loop of hallucinations. The more complex the project gets, the worse the problems. The agent reads its own prior code, which biases it to the prior approach. That bias just pushes issue further, buries them deeper, and you don’t find out until the product is done enough to actually look at it.

I knew a guy who wanted his vibe coding project to display the page count in a PDF. I showed him a super simple python script to do it, but it wasn’t usable for him because his shitty implementation was so unmanageable, so grotesquely over and under engineered at the same time, … he rather spent hours trying and failing to get the AI agent to implement my feature for him.

I've used vibe coding in a project where the coding part was small (20% of the total project, with the complex stuff being the remaining 80%) and it had relatively straightforward workflow that could be tested and accounted for without strange edge cases.

It's not only nepo/conmen types who use vibe coding.

You might try some kind of open source non profit.

No guarantees, but likely at least less evil.

I've done that, and found the same.

But, this person asked for less unethical.

Not 'and also, of similar competence.'

At this point I really do think we need to be forming something like Mondragon-esque, worker governed co-ops, collectives.

Unions aren't enough, back to anarcho-syndicalism, but digital this time!

I agree and I know it's hard to swallow, but that's enabling.

Yes, life is hard and it's not easy or possible for everyone to change jobs. Still.

Correct.

A person who knows about evil and continues to participate in perpetuating it?

That is the definition of complicit.

You either quit, become a hypocrite and coward, or embrace and justify the evil.

Left, liberal, conservative.

Thats pretty much how USAmerican terminology for politics/society works.

This.

I worked for one evil company and I left fairly quickly. They added features that were basically designed to funnel money from gambling addicts and people were even joking about it internally. It felt so gross. I just couldn’t in good conscience stay around.

No.

We won't.

We will get movies designed as either patriotic/honorable, wildly unrealistic, aspirational lifestyle glamorization ... pure cope/hopium, saccharine, hero/success fantasies for adult children to live vicariously through... and warrior hero stories where the plot is incited by external or seditious threats.

That's very roughly what happened to German cinema when the Nazis took over.

We will just have machines making the slop, instead of demented sycophants.

... there won't be any money for things that cause people to maybe actually think!

You want to program compliance and shame into people, not curiosity, not disobedience.

Fight Club was not an initial success, and it largely tricked people via its marketing, into making people think it was going to be something closer to Rocky, but edgier... than a psycho-social critique of basically all of society.

Fight Club is an anomaly.

Fight Club was Chuck saying fuck you to publishers for rejecting his work was too edgy etc. So he went all out, and not only becomes a published book, but a movie.

"Under Spanbauer's influence, Palahniuk produced an early draft of what would later become his novel Invisible Monsters (1999), but it was rejected by all publishers he submitted it to. Palahniuk then wrote a second novel, expanding on his short story, "Fight Club".[9] Initially, Fight Club was published as a seven-page short story in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness (1995),[10] but Palahniuk expanded it to novel length (in which the original short story became chapter six); Fight Club: A Novel was published in 1996.[11]"

1999 novel by Chuck Palahniuk

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

There are specialized niche services/domains in B2B professional services and engineering where it's honestly difficult to be evil due to the nature of the domain and because it's B2B.

One could argue you are are still enabling evil companies, which is fair, but at least you're not really harming anyone.

Capitalism is inherently evil... it's built on exploiting workers through economic coercion by rich capital owners who don't, the labor is not rewarded as much as the hoarding of capital.

Still, we live in a capitalist society, and businesses can be not objectively evil, and we have to support those business and boycott objectively evil ones.

Bill Gates is a bad example. That motherfucker was the most evil corporate asshole in the 90's. He has rehabilitated his image, but net positive is a bridge too far.

As for the rest, I appreciate the nuance. But Bill Gates can go fuck himself. It's easy to be generous with money stolen from somewhere else.

Most of the big tech companies have enough stuff going on that there are non-evil groups within it doing non-evil and it's a judgment call for each person. I worked at an Amazon contractor for a little while and it didn't feel right to me so I moved on pretty quickly.

Places like flock and palantir though? Yes, almost certainly.

Started off fine for roughly a dozen words, then you jump right into Bill Gates.

Bill Gates who was great friends with Jeffrey Epstein, a monopolist, and most recently, worked tirelessly to prevent the sharing of the covid vaccine technology, during the pandemic, because it would harm the profits of his friends in big pharma.

I think your world view needs adjusting.

Bill Gates is a horrible person, he is a criminal.

Microsoft's oligopoly (officially sanctioned and enabled by US society) has cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.

Not to mention his committed support for the current oligarch regime and global corporate criminality more broadly.

That being said, I don't think everyone at Microsoft or Google is evil, but a far larger percent of their employees are evil than one would think (i.e. it's not only the senior executives).

I literally quit Microsoft in large part because I could not morally myself justify working for such a manipulative, lying, exploitative company.

And that was a decade ago.

Yeah, yeah if you work MSFT, you have less moral character than I do, you are certainly aiding and abetting evil; even if you're not directly doing the super evil shit, you're helping the gears keep grinding along.