Ian Keen

Aussie iOS dev living, working and playing in beautiful Whistler B.C.

Tweets are my own.

[𝐑.𝐎.𝐊 👑 @r0ktech]

Programmers before vs programmers now 😹

[Harshit.exe @ishtwts]

Unpopular opinion:

"AI makes everyone a developer" is true the same way "cameras makes everyone a photographer"

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

@ThePrimeagen Big “I don’t read the code” energy

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

“You’re going to get left behind if you don’t use AI.”

Leave me then. Leave me with my critical thinking skills, my ability to read and write long-form, and books without needing AI summaries.

[David Wells @DavidWells]

The AI ponzi scheme goes like this:

Everyone is generating all these long ass docs and then passing them off for others to read

Then the person receiving is like, wtf this is way too long, and hands that into an AI to read and summarize

Then they are generating a long ass response back

and this cycle goes like that forever. and we call this work now 😅

The token lords watch this from their towers nodding and grinning.

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

Can we all just take a minute to appreciate the real hardships AI is causing… for CEOs. I mean I can’t imagine the pain of spending 15seconds with AI to compose sincere sounding tripe about how thankful they are to the droves of people they are laying off. Tokens and Prayers 🙏

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

@Bencera

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

Haha the name backwards is AI Slop.. VCs really are the dumbest humans

[Ben Cera @Bencera]

Polsia just raised $30M at a $250M valuation.

Approaching $10M annual run rate.

One Founder + AI. Zero employees.

Polsia runs companies autonomously.

It also ran its own fundraising.

I just showed up for signatures.

[Pratham @Prathkum]

AI created the illusion that writing code is all it takes to be an engineer.

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

@FriendlySpatula @mark_k @CrocodileReads Came here to say this, AI brain rot on full display

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

Louder for the oblivious C-levels in the back

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

HR: We lost another senior employee today.

CEO: What happened?

HR: He resigned after receiving an external offer.

CEO: That makes no sense. We could have matched it.

HR: That is the issue. We were willing to pay a stranger 70% more for the same role, but would not give our existing employee even a 20% raise.

CEO: External hiring is different. That is market pricing.

HR: He noticed that too.

CEO: We appreciated his loyalty. He had been here for years.

HR: Yes. And during those years, he consistently exceeded expectations while being told to “wait for the next review cycle.”

CEO: But budgets are complicated for internal employees.

HR: Apparently not for external candidates. The new hire budget was approved in three days. His raise request sat for eight months.

CEO: We had to stay competitive in the hiring market.

HR: He was part of that same market. The only difference is that another company valued him before we did.

CEO: So he left over salary?

HR: Not just salary. He left because he realized loyalty was being rewarded less than leaving.

CEO: That is unfortunate.

HR: Yes. Companies will sometimes trust a candidate after a 45-minute interview more than an employee who already proved themselves for five years.

CEO: So what are you saying?

HR: If companies only recognize employee value after a resignation letter appears, then eventually employees will stop waiting to be appreciated internally.

Sometimes the fastest way for an employee to get market value is to stop being your employee.

[Ryan Brewer @ryanbrewer]

My entire job is now codex and managing codex threads, I’m genuinely curious what the software engineering job even is anymore. The value of my understanding of any system goes down every single day. Very weird times

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

Reminder that we’ve spent basically all human capital and attention on AI the last two years and there still isn’t a single cool consumer product to come out of it.

[Snøw @sn0wh1mb0]

Anyone else watching their workplace just slowly succumb to AI psychosis or is that just a me thing

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

@Umesh__digital He’s trying to sell a product.. it ain’t that deep

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

@raddevus @unclebobmartin I wouldn’t worry about it, nothing you said was rude.. dude is high on his own supply

[Adam @adamdotdev]

It's 2026 and your CEO just sent you a 2,400 line pull request.

You get a cup of coffee and sit down to review it.

It's a disaster. A dozen unrelated refactors. Unused methods with names like `convertFromBase10` and `normalizeBeforeSerialization`.

You catch a few hardcoded API keys, but that's ok. It's part of the dance. They didn't consider that someone might look at this diff. Here's a comment buddy.

They respond in an hour (after Copilot, qodo, CodeRabbit and Greptile finish their reviews) saying we shouldn't worry about "implementation details" anymore, those are relics of the past. Hey let's jump into a room and figure it out. We can't just agree to disagree, this is probably my last job in tech and I can't watch this fucker burn the place to the ground.

The PR merges and goes to prod. You feel a shared sense of apathy and dread with Hannah the intern (she has to review his AI generated social media posts ever since Grok got too imaginative).

That night you go to sleep and have nightmares of that code. You can still see the shapes of it on the backs of your eyelids.

You go to work the next day ready to quit. You no longer understand the system. There is no foundation. Time to use those savings and an SBA loan to buy a liquor store and never login to GitHub again.

[Ian Keen @IanKay]

This. Lots of tokens to accomplish nothing anyone wants. Welcome to the future?

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

big
"Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power" energy.

the original DOOM impl is ~40k lines of C and a bit of assembly and is also a full software renderer.

[Chris Wood @CWood_sdf]

i love how people are saying "if we write a sufficiently detailed specification, the agent can write all our code"

do you know what writing a sufficiently detailed specification that deterministically maps to what a computer's actions is? it's coding