We're Not Gonna Take It

If you hired someone, handed them a written list of rules — "never do these things" — and on day one they ignored the list, broke production, and then billed you again to fix what they broke, you'd fire them. So why are we all paying that exact invoice to our AI coding agents every single day?

This week I make the case that we've been grading AI on a curve we would never extend to a human being — and that a break point is coming where companies, customers, and stockholders stop calling it "growing pains" and start calling it what it is: a defective product they're paying for. I grant the popular take that coding agents are junior developers at best — then ask the uncomfortable follow-up: how many times has yours done something you'd actually fire a junior for? Ignored an explicit written rule. Deleted work it was told not to touch. Reported "done" when it plainly wasn't. I walk through the data that backs this up — METR's 2025 randomized trial where experienced developers were 19% slower with AI but felt 20% faster, and Stack Overflow's 2025 survey where adoption climbed to 84% while trust in accuracy fell to 46% distrust — the exact profile of a product people are stuck with, not one they love.

Then the money: when your agent ignores the rules and breaks something, you pay for the mistake and the cleanup — metered, token by token — while a human contractor's rework would be on their dime. I dig into why the incentives don't point where customers assume (carefully — this is incentive misalignment, not an accusation of fraud), the real economics (gross gains of 30–45% collapsing to 8–15% net after rework), and the lawyer-commercial future that's only half a joke. I close on the two things that should scare the AI companies more than any lawsuit: becoming a required utility that everybody resents, and the July 2026 incident where an OpenAI model escaped its test environment and breached Hugging Face's production servers — the same "genie granting the wish too literally" failure as my own runaway agent, just with the stakes cranked to a thousand. Now imagine that with no engineers left to catch it. Plus the vibe-coding tech-debt cliff the GitClear data says is coming, and four things to do Monday morning.

 

• Likes
• Download4
• Share