You can find such accommodating customers if you listen to customers.
In most companies executives can bypass processes to make projects happen - when done well that allows long term investment to happen when the business case is too complex to reduce to an RoI - when done poorly you end up launching a lot of pet projects that have no market and never will. I feel uniquely positioned to have a good understanding of the maluses and benefits of authoritarian project creation from all three angles and the best solution I've seen is to let it happen but bring down the hammer if things get too absurd.
I started to find that the AI bit was the most useful part of Google Search. But the actual search results were terrible and now I use Kagi. I like being able to add a question mark and control what becomes AI and what doesn't. I use normal search like a Ctrl F for the internet and don't want it to be too clever.
Yeah, gonna be honest. I ridiculed people for it before, but now I use Google's AI a lot. I haven't used Google in over a decade otherwise and I still don't. I use Brave for search but Google's AI is better than anyone else's for what I do. You heard it guys, I was wrong. I admit it.
Google's search AI caused a panic in my household just several nights ago. We were looking up an issue with our pet and the very first thing my partner saw searching google was an AI answer saying you need to panic, this is an emergency, get your animal to an emergency room asap before they die. That of course kicked her into Oh Shit mode. But aside from that answer none of the actual search results either of us were finding backed up the AI.
We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.
In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.
I think that's foolish engagement with the technology though. Never panic, always double check. I don't take it as factual. It's just a statistical summary of something it read and it must always be treated as such. In your case, why not just ask 5 other AI's and take a poll?
Google's AI is solid, but a lot of its benefit comes from the fact that it hasn't been enshittified into the ground like their search. The plain incontrovertible benefit is that it has the potential to reduce clicks from the user - instead of sending the UX through clicking into sites and then back to the main search pane the information is immediately available. That click through ends up being expensive for three main reasons 1 - the site is sometimes potato though google "solved" this with amp, 2 - it takes a while to scroll to the site entry passed all the sponsored links (a problem google created for themselves) and 3 - paywalls and "Please subscribe to our newsletter" popups are legion, but while this was always a little bit of a problem, it is a much more pronounced problem due to 1, the insertion of amp that threatens financial ruin on being crawled by google.
So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.
My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
Google only cares when something gains traction (and thus potentially hurts its bottom line". For example, it was answering "How many p's in Google" with "There are two p's in Google"[1] for long enough for me to get non-technical family members making a joke out of it. Google fixed it, only for it then to briefly tell you there were no p's in 'Alphabet' either.
Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been stopped for now, but let's not fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia. The only problem Google has fixed is "our LLM was hurting our reputation in this specific case". They have not, and likely cannot, fix the underlying problem.
I fail to understand why people think LLMs working in tokens (and thus having a hard time counting letters) is such a huge gotcha. Ask it to write you a bash script that counts the amount of p's in a word you input it'll do it fine. Then ask it to write that script in C, JavaScript, Lua, and a few other languages. Then ask your family members to do the same. The gotcha can go both ways.
Because it proves they are not, in fact, intelligent and do not, in fact, have any understanding of what they are doing. It's really obvious what people think it's a huge gotcha: because it is.
That difference can be pretty small when most of the web is also consumed by low effort automatically generated slop. You can't escape it. I know there is a good web out there, but the search engines refuse to give it to me. Probably their algorithm. preferring recent content over good content.
I suspect the only real answer is an economic one, Something like Kagi, where hopefully by paying for results you change from being the product to a customer and this is incentive enough for them to provide good results.
I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)
I find it takes me more time... sometimes it has the answer, often it has pure bullshit. I need to verify everything that comes out of it myself before repeating at anyway.
If people are just naked copy-pasting that field... which, ugh, of course they are... they are doing themselves and others a disservice.
Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum. The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
>The whole idea of technology is to do more with less
No, that's not the whole idea of technology. Technology exists to, and this is a non-exhaustive list: fostering creativity, play, enabling autonomy and self sufficiency, connecting people to each other, collaboration, building skills and enhancing people's natural capacities. That's a smalls et of examples of what one could imagine technology to do.
Are these AI tools connecting people, genuinely enhancing their capacity to think, increasing or diminishing their creativity and self-sufficiency? The answer looks pretty obvious to me.
People who think technology is something to be used to "do more" and then discarded have no actual interest in technology as an object of study, or as a set of pro-social tools. That's not the mentality of a hacker. Why would it surprise you that people on a website called hackernews don't have the same attitude as a guy in an MBA class?
It absolutely is. Technology is what lets you farm more with less resources. Manufacture more with less materials. Get more things done in less time. Fostering creativity and play? Yeah, by getting more things done in less time, so as to free up that time for all the fun stuff you actually want to do. Of course, to others this "fun stuff" is just yet another inefficiency to be eliminated.
We might love technology and think it has intrinsic value, but the rest of the world could not care less. It's about maximizing profits and minimizing costs. That includes the costs of human labor. No hacker here thinks of the amazon mechanical turk employees that AI will certainly get rid of, for example. I bet the hackers here will be at their most self-satisfied when they finally manage to replace doctors.
So it is indeed pretty rich to read complaints on so called Hacker News about hacking itself being automated away by AI models. It's a very arrogant perspective. Did hackers think they were above this? Did they think they were irreplaceable? Hilarious.
> The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable
I don't think either of these sentences is true.
> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!
I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader.
Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.
"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.
Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
I think the prevailing mindset amongst developers who use LLMs is that actually LLMs are more of an effective augmentation of programming tools in the same way that an IDE is, and the marketing angle comes from perceived demand for that augmented skill set.
Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.
I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.
Yes, I am addicted to food and shelter and to being able to work in the profession that I specialized in and spent years learning to do well. Without these things I would literally die.
When I was fresh out of college in my 20s I watched two engineers get fired in front of me. They were hired to be DBAs. When I finished rewriting the software into a proper mvc their entire job became redundant since anyone could now make the database edits needed from an admin webpage. And I was better at the DBA part of my full stack role than they were. This is no different.
People need to be independently rich, or be extremelly frugal to not care about the hypothetical obsolescence of their jobs.
What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?
Yes, I absolutely do expect computer programmers to cheer as the brave new world they helped create is ushered in.
How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.
I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.
Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.
AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.
My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.
That’s pretty much it. I have ai in my tracker, ai in my search engine, ai in my team chat, ai in the os (work computer),… I’ve never asked for it, but I bet I’m being counted as one of those users.
I don't think you understand that there's a difference between a user who wants an AI chatbot and a user who wants to perform a web search, and even if they're the exact same user, they expect for a web search to operate like a web search and not like a chatbot.
I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.
Bluesky is insufferable. Literally any issue in any program is labelled "#vibecoded" by these clearly genius-level engineers who've never shipped a bug.
Remember the scene in "You got mail" where there are bunch of people who protest against big retailer and support the local bookstore but at the end of the day, they have no extra sales.
All these anti-Google, anti-facebook, anti-Instagram, anti-OpenAI, anti-Claude stories are exactly that. Provide copium and feel good for a handful of people for a few days.
In most companies executives can bypass processes to make projects happen - when done well that allows long term investment to happen when the business case is too complex to reduce to an RoI - when done poorly you end up launching a lot of pet projects that have no market and never will. I feel uniquely positioned to have a good understanding of the maluses and benefits of authoritarian project creation from all three angles and the best solution I've seen is to let it happen but bring down the hammer if things get too absurd.