AI Reaction archetypes

THE OSTRICH

often: older technical people who have been at the same company for 10+ years, or non-technical English/humanities majors. They tried free chatgpt.

GPT? Yeah I heard of it. Tried GPT 2. It was shit. This is a bubble, it’s just fancy autocomplete bro. Why would I even waste a minute trying (never mind paying for) a random bullshit generator.

THE DENIER

often: technical people who have moved jobs a few times, and have some experience in smaller or mid sized companies. They’ve tried a few different models, maybe from Anthropic too. They probably have an API key.

Yeah I tried it and it is helpful in creating basic basic stuff, but it all needs to be verified and checked, so it makes me maybe 10% more efficient? AI is kinda neat, but it’s super overblown. The new models aren’t any better, it’s mainly just regurgitating training data, it doesn’t work well on stuff it hasn’t seen

THE PRAGMATIST

often: strongly opinionated indie hacker type people or company owners, or people who like playing with stuff themselves, rather than forming opinions based on what they read. Usually very technical

It’s a game changer, but you have to learn how to use it. You can’t just tell it what you want. It’s a tool. It works better for some things than others. It’s hard to predict how well it’s going to do at a given task, but it’s getting better all the time. I’m kinda scared about what this means for my future, but keeping up, learning how to use it, and hoping my entire industry isn’t destroyed by it seems like the logical thing to do right now. Have you tried MCP?

THE AI BRO

often: less technical, not hands-on-keyboard coders, but have worked in technical startups and know what software development is. Probably bought XRP at some point).

This is the future! AI is going to change everything. Did you see Pieter Levels made a billion dollars from 2 minutes of vibe coding? Anyone can do that now. Software development is dead. I pivoted to AI three times in the last 3 years. This is the worst it’ll ever be. Psyched!