Trapped in an Eternal Cycle of Enshittification

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I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work.

But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1

Of course, it was AI generated.

I spent 30 minutes going over it with a colleague, call it an hour between us. The damn proposal probably only took 5 minutes to generate.

Now listen, if you're using AI to improve your productivity, well good for you. Go for it! Just follow this one golden rule:

Your productivity gains must not come at the expense of others.

This has been happening with plugin review, too. Someone spends an hour in Cursor throwing together a rough cut WordPress plugin. They submit it, and I spend 15 minutes reviewing it. I send back a list of requested changes, which they just copy / paste straight into their AI. And does the AI fix all the problems? Of course not! It's just rinse and repeat, over and over, until I've worked on your plugin longer than you have!

G-d forbid we end up in an agentic2 nightmare where our personal AI assistants tirelessly bounce off one another in an eternal cycle of enshittification.

  1. It shouldn't have to be said, but if you're going to send a proposal, at least check the formatting first. And for the love of all things proprietary, don't send me a Microsoft Word document. If your proposal is poor quality, what sort of expectations am I supposed to have about your actual work? ↩︎

  2. This will be the 2025 word of the year. Calling it now. ↩︎