DEV Community: Ben Link

Requiem for a Species: How AI Destroys Humanity

Ben Link — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:10:00 +0000

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay... or so say all the "Influencers" in every tech space on every platform. Since about the middle of 2023, we've been permanently "6 months away from AI completely taking over software engineering!"

Oh, don't get me wrong, LLMs and MCPs and Agents and OpenClaws (and all the new family of buzzwords) have made tremendous strides... and it truly is exciting to see the latest manner in which we've tricked rocks into thinking for us.

But y'all... I gotta say, I'm a little worried about the trajectory we've established. I think it's time we have a talk.

First, let's talk about... everything else

In 1969, the US Department of Defense made a connection between a few key computers called ARPANET. It was created out of fear of a nuclear strike - if the Soviets bombed our research facility, everything we were working on would be lost! We need to protect that research, so we created an easy way to transmit the data to another location. Then in the 1990s, we saw a "worldwide web" built on ARPANET's technology and learning. For a few years, the web was a place of people exploring and building and learning together and sharing. But the infrastructure was expensive.

And then came the advertisers. Somebody got the bright idea to make some money by selling advertising space on their web page. Then someone else figured out how to make an ad "pop up" in a new window when you visited their page. The entire internet became a hellscape of windows popping over (and under) the page you wanted to view... sometimes multiple ads for a single content page. If you lived through this era, the trauma's still too near to talk about.

But in the early 2000s, the dot-com era arrived: we started thinking of ways to use this "internet" thing to make money. Everybody needed a domain name, even if they didn't have a business plan. The Bubble Popped. Loads of businesses went bankrupt. Millions in venture capital was flushed down the drain. People lost jobs... and fortunes... overnight.

During this bubble-pop, some new technological advancements entered the arena, dubbed "Web 2.0". It wasn't enough to visit a website and see a bunch of static content, users needed to interact with the site. The browser, with interactive technologies like Flash and Javascript, rose to prominence... and we started thinking about ways that we could interact with people using the internet. First there were web forums, but those gradually became larger and larger communities, eventually evolving into Social Media websites. Myspace... and then Facebook... along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and a host of others, consumed us. We could keep up with our friends around the world, and share our thoughts and news in a way we had never been able to before!

But you can't run a site that serves billions of users on goodwill. These sites started as side projects born of the desire to connect someone to their colleagues, friends, family, or neighbors, but they never charged their users to participate. (At least, the ones who survived never did...) They needed a way to pay for the massive amounts of infrastructure they created.

And then came the advertisers. One by one, the revenue pressures of running a business consumed each of the "connection" platforms. Today, my feed consists of a ratio of about 1 friend's post to 3-4 "Promoted" posts for things I never subscribed to. We all hate it, but the platform has to make its money somehow and we'd all quit in a heartbeat if we had to pay to remain on the platform.

While this was happening, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and changed the way we communicate on the go. The phone platform offered apps of all sorts. The app stores were filled by developers doing what developers love to do: building things and sharing them. For a while, it was a fun place where we could explore the possibilities.

And then came the advertisers. Take a look at your app store now. You can classify all the apps as one of these types:

Free apps maintained by a large company to give you access to the systems you're already subscribed to (so they can keep you on their "real estate" as much as possible). Think Google services, or your car insurance company, or your social media platforms.
"Free" apps that do nothing unless you subscribe to the company's service (usually for a monthly fee).
Paid apps that you buy for a large price tag in order to use, just like old-school software purchases.
Paid apps that you buy for a tiny price tag (sometimes they're free apps too though) and then they nickel & dime you to death with "microtransactions" to unlock the full functionality.

I REALLY hope you're seeing the pattern here

Every technological advance in my lifetime has followed the same playbook:

Someone comes up with a cool idea that improves the world.
They share it, people love it, it scales up to the point that it "becomes a business" instead of being a hobby project
Shareholders demand profits, revenue pressures cause leadership to cave, this thing isn't gonna pay for itself!
We use the technology as a vehicle for advertising in order to pay for it
It becomes 💩💩💩.

Heck, we don't even have to talk about technology. I believe can generalize the pattern to this statement:

When anything good scales up to the level that Advertisers and "the Money Men" get involved, its death has already begun.

I see it in College Sports here in the US, where NIL (name, image, likeness) deals and The Transfer Portal are new factors, and the centuries-old tradition of playing for school pride has been replaced with athletes transferring between schools in order to build their own personal brands instead.

I see it in TV entertainment, where we all abandoned cable in favor of streaming services only to be saddled with price hikes and intrusive advertising (which were the main reason we cut the cable cord to begin with).

And that brings me to AI

Even this year during the Super Bowl, we began to see the stress fractures appear in AI companies... evidence that they're following the same path. Anthropic ran an ad throwing shade at OpenAI for the announcement that ChatGPT with Ads in your prompt responses was coming soon. Now it's easy to say "good job, Anthropic" and switch to Claude over GPT, but...

Leopards don't change spots, y'all. Big Tech has a consistent playbook. We're going to have a brief period that we will someday look back on as the "Golden Age of AI", when we're all building and learning and growing and enjoying the benefits... but it won't last long. Shareholders will grow tired of waiting. CFOs will rein in spending. CROs will look for ways to roll out price hikes. CEOs will talk about efficiency and profitability. Monetization will win out over open sharing yet again.

Why this is a Problem

I can hear some of you already: "We've weathered every previous iteration of this storm, Blink. There's nothing to worry about!"

This time is different though.

Kelsey Hightower, who's been a super-respected name in Tech for a long time now, had this somewhat tongue-in-cheek post on LinkedIn back in February:

It might just be played for laughs, but after following Kelsey for a long time, I read it differently. It's a nugget of wisdom wrapped in a bit of a flippant hot-take. You probably need somebody to hold up a sarcasm sign.

See, in all the previous tech advancement iterations, we collectively moved forward despite the setback. Lots of people lost jobs and/or fortunes when the dot-com bubble popped, but they still had improved skills that they could apply to show for it. You might be an unemployed frontend developer, but... you were still a frontend developer with marketable skills.

Contrast that with what's happening in the AI space. Experienced software engineers are seeing 6-10x efficiency boosts by building an army of Agents to do their bidding, but every time you tell the Agents to write the code for you, it moves you one step further away from having the intrinsic skill of writing code yourself.

(There's a really intriguing article over on Psychology Today suggesting that this isn't a "loss of ability", but instead "estrangement from the part of yourself that thinks". Semantics aside, the end result looks pretty similar.)

Now let's fast-forward on the inevitable path toward monetization of AI. You've sacrificed your own personal expertise for speed-of-delivery, and you've put all that expertise... where, exactly?

...behind a subscription fee.

We've seen the articles, y'all. Investors are pouring MASSIVE amounts of money into AI companies. Those investments will eventually have to be settled someday... and where are they going to get the money to settle it up?

Advertisements and/or Subscription fees. And since we've already expressed our distaste for a world where AI is "polluted" with advertising... guess who's going to foot the bill when the investors stop?

That's right... you are.

These companies aren't giving away Artificial Intelligence as a service - they're harvesting human intelligence and putting it behind a paywall, to rent it back out to you.

Uh, is Blink becoming, like, a Doomsday Prepper or something?

Nope, I'm not. I'm also not saying that you shouldn't use AI tooling. I firmly believe that as technology professionals, we should be fluent in technology, even kinds that we hold at arm's length. In fact, I think maybe we should be even more fluent in the kinds we hold at arm's length... because we need to understand it well enough to make informed decisions.

Get in there, learn how AI tooling works, learn what it's good at and what it absolutely should NOT be used for. Build. Grow. But most importantly...

Under NO circumstances should you stop learning to do it the "old-fashioned way".

Because someday soon, you're going to realize that you have to pay them for the privilege of having a bot do the thing you used to be able to do on your own.

The Adventures of Blink S5e10: Wrapping it All Up

Ben Link — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:05:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we wrap up our our Breakout clone - we'll learn how to turn a python script into an executable and then how to post a project to itch.io.

If you're the kind of person who waits to start a series until you can binge the whole thing... now is your moment! Come by, 👍🏻 and subscribe, and learn to build with me!

The Adventures will return this Fall... but come back here next week for the usual offseason blog posts! See ya 'round!

The Adventures of Blink S5e9: Saving and Loading

Ben Link — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today's adventure adds a key feature to our Breakout clone - the ability to save our progress, and load it back. Thing is, we don't want to write those components from scratch on our own... so we're going to let the system help us.

Stop by the channel, 👍🏻 and subscribe... you know the drill. Let's build together!

The Adventures of Blink S5e8: Special Bricks

Ben Link — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:35:00 +0000

Hey friends! What a season it's been - This Adventure of Blink is flying right by. We have a working game, but... we'd like to have a little something more. What if we had special bricks in the game that, when you hit them, caused a second ball to enter the game?

Stop by the channel and let's build together... and please leave me a 👍🏻, a 💬, and subscribe!

The Adventures of Blink S5e7: Winning is Everything

Ben Link — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:05:00 +0000

Hey friends! Season 5 of The Adventures of Blink continues - we have a game that works, but we're missing something pretty important: the Win screen! Come join me today as we make it possible to win our game.

Leave me a 👍🏻 and a 💬 to help the channel, and subscribe so you won't miss future episodes!

The Adventures of Blink S5e6: On So Many Levels

Ben Link — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we're making our game last longer... by adding different levels. In order to make them work, we're going to need a level loader...

Come along and let's build together! Leave me a 👍🏻 and a 💬 to help the channel!

The Adventures of Blink S5e5: Collisions!

Ben Link — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:30:00 +0000

Hey friends, welcome to The Adventures of Blink! Today we continue our breakout clone build with some work on one of the key mechanics in the game: the ability for objects to collide with each other.

Make sure you leave a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe so you'll stay connected!

The Adventures of Blink S5e4: The Paddle and the Ball

Ben Link — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:45:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we've finally got the foundation we need, and it's time to start working on some gameplay features! We'll start with two key features: the Paddle and the Ball.

Make sure you leave a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe!

The Adventures of Blink S5e3: A Menu in Pygame

Ben Link — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we're building a main menu for our Breakout clone using Pygame. I know, I know... we don't have a game yet, but we're building a foundation here, gameplay's coming soon!

Make sure you leave a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe!

The Adventures of Blink S5e2: Logs and Configs

Ben Link — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today we continue building our Breakout clone with a look at how to set up logging, and how to build a configuration file for our game to use.

Come hang out, leave me a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe to the channel so you'll get notifications when new episodes drop!

The Adventures of Blink S5e1: Kicking off the Build

Ben Link — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:25:00 +0000

Hey friends, welcome to Season 5 of The Adventures of Blink! Today we kick off the new season of Youtube videos with the setup work for a retro gaming build: We're writing Breakout in Python!

Make sure to leave me a Like 👍🏻, a Comment 💬, and Subscribe to the channel. It's free for you, but it helps me reach more people who can learn from our adventures together!

Journal of a Half-Committed Vibe Coder

Ben Link — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:15:00 +0000

As I'm prepping Season 5 of The Adventures of Blink, I've been building the code for our Adventure ahead of time.

SIDE NOTE: Season 5 starts NEXT WEEK!!!! Episodes drop on Thursdays just like our Adventures here - make sure you come by the Youtube channel and leave me a like, a comment, even just an emoji... and click subscribe. It's free and it helps more people find our Adventures together!

In the process of building our app, I've been using AI as a companion. It's readily available, usually faster than me wading through the docs for whatever random thing I need to remember how to do, and, well, most of all... I'm curious about it. There's tons upon tons of hype out there, and folks who've sold out to the idea that software engineers are going to be replaced next week. Is it true? One way to find out is to try it out and see... so the fact that I'm regularly building something for an education project is a really handy tool for experimentation. (Ooh, we should talk sometime about the value of building in public and learning in this fashion...💡💡💡)

Anyway... as I'm doing this, I thought I'd write down some things I learned from the process. What follows are some observations from several weeks of coding work.

You'll note that I call myself a "half-committed" Vibe Coder. What I mean by this is that I'm not necessarily meeting the definition of VibeCoding - I don't just yeet my requirements in there and tell the model to generate the code. I'm working alongside it, writing as much code myself as I'm asking it to write, and using it for sounding board and exploration.

Also, I do software work for a day job in addition to The Adventures of Blink. Some of my observations come from that work, too.

Watching a Bubble Pop In Real Time

The longer I use it, the less I trust AI tooling to take on big things. This is weird to me, because as I listen to the Hype Machine, they're recommending the exact opposite approach. "You need to give it more freedom! You need to write less code yourself and get the bot to do more for you!"

But literally every time I do this, it gets in over its head almost right away! The project we're building for Season 5 is a game... so it has a couple basic patterns to consider:

The game Event Loop
Screen painting logic
Loading & Saving

It's important to note that I'm not thoroughly designing every requirement and building a full project plan... because that's not usually how a hobbyist works. We like to build some basics, get a couple things working, and then try to add features. This isn't like a Waterfall shop where we have a couple of weeks of design phase to document every capability before anyone touches a keyboard.

This brings me to my first point:

Your Copilot will absolutely lead you down the Primrose Path

When I said "I'm thinking about building a Breakout clone game"... the LLM started in the middle. It began responding to the idea of building a Pygame-based application and constructed a main loop that initialized the game right in the window.

I had to stop it and say, "Hey, wouldn't the game's user experience be better if we had a main menu before just dropping you into the game?"

record scratch

It immediately built out the main menu code in our chat. But then I had to stop it again, and point out that I had an empty project structure - how am I going to organize the code files? Where will my art assets live? What about the app's configuration file, so that I'm not hard-coding all my variables into it? Automated tests?

My point in all of this is that you can't eliminate the human developer from this conversation. In its eagerness to please, AI completely bypasses the design thinking and decisions that make the project maintainable. It doesn't stop to ask questions about the big picture, it just builds...

...Like a brand-new junior developer.

Would you just turn a fresh-out-of-school new hire loose on your company's mission-critical applications with minimal guidance? If not... why would you ever do it with an AI?

The Token Consumption Loop

I gave my copilot a task to build a function with a very simple calculation in it that I didn't feel like doing (fight me, Trigonometry class was 2 decades ago 😏).

SIX ITERATIONS LATER, we have something that I'm still not completely happy with, but it's kinda functional. My copilot and I have argued over how this works for a couple hours at this point, and I'd be embarrassed to find out how many tokens I burned on the problem. I'm frustrated with it and at the point where I'm most likely going to pitch the whole thing out and rewrite from scratch. My "time-saving" vibe-coding prompt has cost me more time than stopping to figure it out by hand.

That wasn't a one-off situation, either; I've had the same experience repeatedly.

Another observation I've had in this space is that when I ask it to do something, it... talks. A LOT. I can ask a question that should resolve to a one-liner, and it feels the need to explain the whole history of the process of getting that to a one-liner. Even when I ask it to be terse, it still tries to explain itself more.

In a world where tokens-per-invocation is highly monetized (and therefore, tightly controlled by budget), it's just not cost-effective... and even borderline suspicious. If you're selling tokens, it certainly makes sense that you'd squeeze as many as you can out of every invocation...

Ensloppification

At work, I picked up a story to do some refactoring on a 1,000-line python module. The signs of vibe-coding are there:

One file, a thousand lines long.
Three different classes declared in it.
The core functionality in the module wasn't even part of any of the classes, it was just riding along in the file.
No organization to the code - just a plate of 🍝 to try to trace my way through.
Circular import logic.
Minimal documentation / comments, and what was there didn't really explain anything.
Files were opened and read and their content was never used before the variable was used to open a different file and read it in.
Our static analysis tool had a stroke - one method scored 211 on the cognitive complexity calculator.

Now, it's important to realize:

The code works. The outputs match the inputs. If someone who's never done coding work before picked this up, they'd be excited by it (and that's kinda the story-- the business execs saw it run and were thrilled with how fast we delivered).

But this module is the first use case in what we anticipate will be a family of use cases... each of which will need a customized version of this module that plugs into the overall application frame.

In its current state, this code can't be an example to another developer of how to build your use case.

Think about it: the new requirement comes in to build the second use case, and what's the developer going to do? LOOK at the first one! And he'll spend days unraveling the spaghetti.

And now the arguers appear

A lot of you reading this will probably want to correct me, to explain why I'm being unfair to our new AI overlords, why my opinions are invalid.

That's totally cool. We should be debating these kinds of things, and we should do it in a civil manner. So here are some of the things I've already thought of as counterarguments to this post:

The "Junior Dev" Analogy is a Feature, Not a Bug

Blink, you should be scaling up so you have a collection of a hundred Junior Devs doing your bidding, while you're the Architect!

This feels compelling, and on the surface it seems like it should be empowering... but it doesn't reconcile with what we hear in the hype, does it? I just refreshed my LinkedIn feed and the first 3 posts were people telling me how AI Agents have ended software engineering, we just don't know it yet... how the AI-pocalypse is upon us and our entire profession is on the chopping block. So which is it? Are we being empowered or destroyed? Can't really be both.

The "Vibe Coding" vs. "Agentic Workflows" Gap

Blink, you're just doing it wrong. These problems exist because you aren't using $SOME_FRAMEWORK, or $SOME_MODEL.

I find it highly suspicious when anyone promises that I'll get all the benefits, as long as I just add this one other thing... because it becomes a perpetual "you need one more thing". I feel the ick, like when a pyramid marketing scheme person comes after me.

"Ensloppification" is a Human Discipline Issue.

Blink, you could actually cure ensloppification with AI if you just prompt it to produce clean code...

Here's the problem with this line of reasoning: AI is being marketed as a way to make it possible for ANYONE to build an app. And it's being used by ANYONE, regardless of their knowledge level, to build apps.

You're not wrong: the human is absolutely responsible for the quality of their code. But many of them probably don't know that yet. And they're going to put things out into the world that look like good apps... that work... that might even generate revenue... yet they're buggy and full of security holes and dangerous to use but there's no way to tell them apart from well-engineered production-quality systems.

We saw this just a couple weeks ago, when someone vibe-coded a platform that hit 1.5M users in 4 days. And then 3 days after that, the entire production database was accessed and leaked - API keys, emails, private messages.

Y'all. We have enough trouble keeping the bad guys out in traditional software engineering, and this vibe-into-production model is over here leaving the key in the doorknob.

Wrapping Up

I'm excited about new tech... it's a major reason why I'm in the field. What I'm not excited for is irresponsible uses of new tech. Our planet has enough problems already without us destroying the software that runs it.

All I'm asking for is a little caution and thoughtfulness. Is that too much?