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The Lonely Future We’re Building With AI

Written on 2025-12-09 by Adam Drake - 8 min read

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I was at a Notion conference recently in Berlin. It was a really professional event and obviously AI was the hot topic in the room. One of the presentations was with some startup founders and they were asked about their opinions on AI and what the future would look like.

As a software developer I was appalled by their answers. The last answer in particular predicts a very lonely future.

One answer:

I think we have seen in the last 12 months what AI can do in software. You can produce an app now in a few days and then have it rolled out to users.

Another answer:

I think in 12 months WE (as in we humans) will be set tasks by AI as they can go through data when we sleep and come up with tasks that need doing.

Another answer:

AI is making me so productive that I don’t need to hire nearly as many people now. Companies in the future will be much smaller.

Finally:

I don’t think we’re that far away from the first “$1 billion single man company”

These answered stirred up a whole load of emotions inside me. This is a recurring theme for me nowadays. In this article I will deep dive into each statement and give my thoughts.

I think we have seen in the last 12 months what AI can do in software. You can produce an app now in a few days and then have it rolled out to users.

I am seeing a sentiment, especially in management and people who aren’t in the weeds of Software everyday, that AI can essentially code now. This drives me absolutely crazy.

It’s not helped by people at Y combinator and the like spouting rubbish that all startups in Silicon Valley are now vibe coding their apps in record time.

Let’s get one thing straight.

Building a crappy little MVP in Nextjs with Tailwind that looks like it does the thing you want is not the same as building a scalable piece of reliable software that can really support a business.

But there is a growing gap between what business people THINK AI can produce and what it actually can do in reality.

This isn’t helped by every AI model company CEO telling the masses that AI can produce 60, 70, 80 or even 100% of your code and everything will be hunky dory.

Let me tell you, as a software developer who has been using these Generative AI tools from day one, it‘s nothing like that.

AI is a rampant text generator and fantastic pattern matcher. It seems to know everything right up until the point when you tell it that it made mistake. Then it tells you “that’s a great point” like you’re a god damn genius and then continues to churn out more text. (Oh and I am saying the word “text” deliberately because thats ultimately what it is).

Have you seen the way AI generators produce code? Top to bottom. No developer ever writes code top to bottom. You write it in logical steps and jump around a file to fill in the details as you work through the problem.

The AI is not thinking. It has no intelligence. It just spouts out patterns it’s seen over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly sophisticated pattern matcher and it’s remarkable how far it can get with this skill, but it’s certainly not ‘thinking’.

I think in 12 months WE (as in we humans) will be set tasks by AI as they can go through data when we sleep and come up with tasks that need doing.

This one depressed the hell out of me. AI is going to become our task master? We’re literally going to become slaves to the machine? The person stating this fact seemed quite happy about this future. I was in disbelief.

A task master is a person who imposes a harsh or onerous workload on someone. I wonder if AI will be a hard task master?

Are we really pursuing the pinnacle of all technology — AGI — at breakneck speed just so it can increase our already bloated TODO list? That seriously can’t be it. Right? Right?!?

AI is making me so productive that I don’t need to hire nearly as many people now. Companies in the future will be much smaller.

This is very topical right now and depending on which source you get your news from, could very well be true.

I don’t think it’s quite as obvious as some people like to make out but whether you like to admit it or not, AI is definitely having some impact in the work place.

From my own experience and speaking to people within my social circle I can see pretty much everyone is using generative AI to some extent. The feedback I hear varies greatly but regardless, it’s being used.

Is it making you more productive though?

That’s not so easy to answer because it can be very subjective. Just because you can create more words in a given time doesn’t necessarily mean you are being more productive. What about all the extra noise that is being created now? Summaries after summaries. Notifications galore. All the extra code that is now being produced? Is this a productivity shift or just more slop?

From what I have read and understood, power users of AI are seeing tangible benefits but for the average Joe, not so much.

Is it having an effect on hiring?

Well, I can see in the software world that the interviews now expect AI to be used as part of coding challenges and recruiters want to know how you are fitting AI into your workflow.

Will companies be much smaller? I’ll get into that in the next section.

I don’t think we’re that far away from the first “$1 billion single man company”

Whereas AI becoming our Task Master depresses me, this prediction saddens me.

Is this really what we are aspiring to as a society? To work alone with our AI agents to produce extraordinary wealth for the individual? Is this really the dream for an up and coming tech entrepreneur?

How sad. To work alone in a room building up a huge pile of cash to ultimately do what? To sit alone in your huge new mansion surrounded by your material wealth anxiously checking you bank balance on your phone every 5 minutes?

How is this even a goal for a human being? Is this how far we have fallen as a society?

I know we hold aloft the star individual. The clinical CEO entrepreneur who created a transformative company and changed the ‘direction of history’ with their incredible latest innovation. We all aspire to be the next ‘big thing’ and we’re learning how to reduce everything to ‘first principles’. But are we now aspiring to do all this alone?

Please no…

Please lets stop this madness and learn that this journey we’re on should not be taken alone.

Conclusion

The future of AI is extremely difficult to predict. The tools we’re using everyday and constantly evolving and changing. Things you weren’t even dreaming of 6 months ago are now a reality.

Having said that, some of the predictions I heard at this conference really shook me in a negative way. It all seemed so… bleak. Yet again we are building a technology to isolate ourselves and promote the individual. To push more power into the individual and hold that aloft above everything else.

Why do we continually do this as a society? Why do we think our problems will be solved once we are all isolated and ‘rich’? I sincerely hope we don’t go down this road but as history likes to show us, we inevitably will.

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Written by Adam Drake

Adam Drake is a Frontend React Developer who is very passionate about the quality of the web. He lives with his wife and three children in Prague in the Czech Republic.