Introduction
Let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t another blog post about AI taking over the world, replacing jobs, or sparking some sci-fi uprising. Nope. This is a rant. Our rant, really, because if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve felt it too. People’s obsession with AI is making us dumber by the day. As someone who lives and breathes design and development, I’m watching this unfold in real time, and it’s bumming me out.
Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.
Before we go further, one disclaimer, because I don’t want this to get lost in the noise: I am not anti-AI. I use it daily. It’s a genuinely great tool. What I’m against is treating it like a substitute for a brain instead of an extension of one. Keep that distinction in mind as you read, because the whole piece hinges on it.
The AI Overload
AI is everywhere. It’s not just a tool anymore; it’s the tool. For some people, it’s practically a life support system. You can’t scroll through a tech keynote without hearing “AI” every five seconds. Every big tech company is cramming AI into everything, whether the product asked for it or not. I’m half expecting garbage cans to start bragging about their AI-powered trash-sorting skills any day now. That would be trash talking for real.
This is the peak of enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s term for the way platforms decay: they start out serving users well, then start exploiting users to serve business, then exploit business to serve shareholders. First the product is good. Then it’s good enough to keep you locked in. Then it’s just good enough to keep you from leaving. AI hasn’t invented this pattern, but it’s become the accelerant.
When everything gets an AI makeover whether it needs one or not, “innovation” starts looking a lot like noise dressed up as progress.
And here’s the thing that makes this more than a vibe: the data backs it up now. In June 2026, automated traffic overtook human traffic on the web for the first time in its history. Cloudflare’s own numbers put it at 57.4% bot requests to 42.6% human, and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince admitted he’d expected that crossover to land in 2027, not a year and a half early. Six months earlier, bots were still a minority. That’s not a slow drift. That’s a landslide.
The Dark Side
What’s really messing with my head is how AI’s becoming a crutch for so many people in the design and dev world. I see it every day. Developers and designers who lean so hard on AI that they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. Problem solving and critical thinking are becoming endangered skills. Instead of wrestling with a challenge, some people just feed it to an AI and call it a day. And then, surprise, they’re the same ones complaining that AI is “replacing” them. Here’s a hot take: if you’re outsourcing your brain to AI, you’re not getting replaced; you’re devolving. At that point, AI deserves your job.
In our universities, students are using AI to write their essays. Tutors are then using AI to mark those essays. After three years, AI takes the job. It actually seems quite fair.
So where does this lead? Over-reliance breeds atrophied skills. Atrophied skills produce lower-quality, more generic output. Generic output is exactly what floods the web and calls itself content. That chain is why far-fetched theories like the Dead Internet Theory and enshittification aren’t so far-fetched anymore.
The Dead Internet Theory used to be a fringe idea whispered on forums: the claim that most of what you see online isn’t made by people at all, just bots and algorithms talking to each other. In 2026 it stopped sounding paranoid. “AI slop” is now a recognized term for the low-effort synthetic content flooding every feed, and it’s popular enough that entire sites now exist just to mock it. One of them, built specifically to poke fun at AI-generated images, had racked up 50 million hits within its first year online. That’s not a fringe reaction anymore. That’s a mainstream one.
Our obsession with AI is fueling this, creating a digital world that feels hollow and manipulative. Future generations might grow up in an online landscape where authentic human creativity is buried under algorithmic noise, and every product or service is optimized for engagement rather than value. It’s a weird, dark path where genuine connection and original thought could become rare, leaving us with a slick but soulless internet that’s more about control than creativity. I am 100% against this. No caveats, no “well actually.” A web built to serve algorithms instead of people is a failure state, not progress.
Vibe Coding and the AI Crutch
Then there’s “vibe coding”: developers using AI to generate code for them, often without fully reading or understanding what comes out the other end. Sure, it’s handy for quick fixes or debugging small errors. But I’ve watched people spend more time tweaking prompts to get AI to spit out exactly what they want than it would’ve taken to just write the thing themselves. It’s like hiring a chef to make you a sandwich while you stand there dictating every little thing. AI should sit in the background, quietly helping you out, not steal the spotlight while you prompt it like it’s your personal genie.
And 2026 has given us plenty of receipts for why that matters. Security researchers found a Firebase misconfiguration on one popular vibe-coding platform that left over 170 production applications exposed, databases and all. A separate breach on an AI-agent social platform exposed roughly 1.5 million authentication tokens after its founder admitted, seemingly with pride, that he hadn’t written a single line of code himself. By March 2026, one report tracked 35 new CVEs traced directly to AI-generated code in a single month, up from just 6 in January. David Mytton, CEO of the developer-security firm Arcjet, put it plainly at the start of the year: he expects “big explosions” as more vibe-coded software hits production without anyone checking under the hood.
Here’s the pattern, and it’s the same one from the last section: skip the understanding, ship the vulnerability, repeat. When developers don’t write the code, they don’t understand the code. When they don’t understand the code, they can’t debug it, secure it, or maintain it at 2am when it breaks. Even Andrej Karpathy, the guy who coined “vibe coding” in the first place, declared it obsolete a year later, not because it doesn’t work, but because the industry needed something with actual guardrails.
I use AI myself, plenty. It’s great for the tedious stuff in my design work: knocking out documentation, filling in placeholders, generating quick graphics, fixing my grammar when I’m too lazy to proofread. Those are the boring bits, and I’m happy to let AI handle them so I can focus on the creative, problem-solving stuff that makes me me as a designer. But offloading my actual thinking? My creativity? No way. My brain’s not perfect, but it’s mine, and I’m not about to let an algorithm take the wheel.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong. AI is one of the greatest technological leaps we’ve ever made, and used well, it has real potential to make our lives better. But the way we’re using it right now gives big dystopian vibes. This over-reliance is a problem, and it’s not going to be fixed by some top-down mandate. It starts with us: individuals choosing to use our brains instead of handing them over to a model.
We were born with incredible minds. They’re messy, imperfect, and sometimes slow, but they’re ours. Let’s use them. AI can tag along for the ride. It just shouldn’t get to drive.