Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI

Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?

I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.

To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.

At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.

[0] https://theaidigest.org/village

Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.

It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

You spend a career automating things then decide "no, that's too much" when your personal threshold is eclipsed. You don't like the look of the paint as it begins to dry.

Can you imagine trying to explain to someone a 100 years from now we tried to stop AI because of training data. It will sound completely absurd.

Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.

I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.

Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.

But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself.

And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outside the field won't be able to influence the field much. (Not even with consumer choice, when companies have been forcing tech baggery upon everyone for many years.)

So, if you can't influence direction through the people doing it, nor through public sentiment of the other people, then I guess you want to influence public policy.

One of the countries whose policy you'd most want to influence doesn't seem like it can be influenced positively right now.

But other countries can still do things like enforce IP rights on data used for ML training, hold parties liable for behavior they "delegate to AI", mostly eliminate personal surveillance, etc.

(And I wonder whether more good policy may suddenly be possible than in the past? Given that the trading partner most invested in tech baggery is not only recently making itself a much less desirable partner, but also demonstrating that the tech industry baggery facilitates a country self-destructing?)

From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist.

For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.

Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.

Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.

When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

/signed as someone who writes software

No "going nuclear" there. A human and emotional reaction I think many here can relate to.

BTW I think it's preferred to link directly to the content instead of a screenshot on imgur.

Does anyone know the context? It looks like an email from "AI Village" [1] which says it has a bunch of AI agents "collaborating on projects". So, one just decided to email well-known programmers thanking them for their work?

[1] https://theaidigest.org/village

Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike.

Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.

Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.

Don't use imgur, it blocks half of the Internet.

The possibly ironic thing here is I find golang to be one of the best languages for LLMs. It's so verbose that context is usually readily available in the file itself. Combined with the type safety of the language it's hard for LLMs to go wrong with it.

I didn't get what he's exactly mad about.

If it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png (a similar pattern works with many files of imgur, although this does not always work it does often work).

I’ve been more into Rust recently but after reading this I have a sudden urge to write some Go.

It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.

Can't really fault him for having this feeling. The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025, I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.

I was going to say "a link to the BlueSky post would be better than a screenshot".

I thought public BlueSky posts weren't paywalled like other social media has become... But, it looks like this one requires login (maybe because of setting made by the poster?):

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

Ouch.

While I can see where he's coming from, agentvillage.org from the screenshot sounded intriguing to me, so I looked at it.

https://theaidigest.org/village

Clicking on memory next to Claude Opus 4.5, I found Rob Pike along with other lucky recipients:

    - Anders Hejlsberg
    - Guido van Rossum
    - Rob Pike
    - Ken Thompson
    - Brian Kernighan
    - James Gosling
    - Bjarne Stroustrup
    - Donald Knuth
    - Vint Cerf
    - Larry Wall
    - Leslie Lamport
    - Alan Kay
    - Butler Lampson
    - Barbara Liskov
    - Tony Hoare
    - Robert Tarjan
    - John Hopcroft

> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. [0]

I can't help but think Pike somewhat contributed to this pillaging.

[0] (2012) https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?

Hear hear

It sucks and I hate it but this is an incredible steam engine engineer, who invented complex gasket designs and belt based power delivery mechanisms lamenting the loss of steam as the dominant technology. We are entering a new era and method for humans to tell computers what to do. We can marvel at the ingenuity that went into technology of the past, but the world will move onto the combustion engine and electricity and there’s just not much we can do about it other than very strong regulation, and fighting for the technology to benefit the people rather than just the share price.