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Imitative AI Business Fraud And What It Means For Programming [1]

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Date: 2025-06-05

As you have probably heard, an imitative AI firm named Builder.AI that purported to use imitative AI to build your programs for you has collapsed. It turns out that the imitative AI doing the programming was not an imitative AI but rather 700 Indian developers in a trench coat. Huh. I guess that we can’t just replace programmers with imitative AI just yet, can we?

The above sentence sounds snotty (and to be fair, it is. I am still a little shit at heart), but I genuinely think that imitative AI simply cannot replace programmers, at least not in any meaningful sense, not really even at the junior level. If it was possible to do so, surely a Microsoft backed firm dedicated to the proposition that imitative AI can code for you would not have actually been, well, 700 Indian developers in a trench coat. The fall of this firm speaks directly to the mania that executives labor under regarding imitative AI.

Executives really, really, really want imitative AI to replace people. You can see it in the way that the CEOs talk about imitative AI. The CEO of Duolingo not only insisted that imitative AI can replace contract workers, he stated that imitative AI would replace all teachers. Now, he furiously backpedaled when it became clear that his customers hated the idea of being fed AI slop in their language lessons, but he is not alone in his love for imitative AI. The Shopify CEO recently did the same, and Microsoft but half a billion dollars into the company that turned out to be 700 Indian developers in a trench coat. These people really, really want to be able to tell Wall Street that their stock should go up because they can fire people and pay the remaining folks less. The problem, as our afore mentioned 700 Indian developers in a trench coat suggests, is that imitative AI isn’t that good at programming.

Here is the part where I inevitably get inundated with people saying it helps them be productive. First, probably not really. Second, the kinds of things imitative AI can do okay are not the kinds of things that translate into massive cost savings for companies. Yes, you can use it to figure out the syntax of moving from one language to another (give me back my increment operator, you python weenies!). Yes, if you really know what you are doing, you can use it to write small tasks — just as long as you understand the task and language well enough to catch the weird errors it makes. And maybe, if you beat on the output long enough and hard enough, you can use it to write a small, easily understood system that never, ever has to change. None of that leads to the kinds of savings that these companies require to make their money back.

Imitative AI is not a replacement for programmers, and it is likely not even a productivity boost for most. Microsoft made only 500 million last year with its Copilot subscriptions — a programming tool based on imitative AI. Now, half a billion sounds like a lot to normal people, but Microsoft’s revenue in that same fiscal year was 270 billion dollars. And Microsoft loses a LOT of money on those subscriptions. If Copilot was actually saving companies money or increasing productivity, wouldn’t more companies sign up for it and wouldn’t they pay a price that made Microsoft money? Wouldn’t an imitative AI programming company be imitative AI and not 700 Indian developers in a trench coat?

This is not to say that these CEOs won’t try to fire people, and are not already firing people, in the service of using more imitative AI. It is to point out that even in one of the easiest spaces for an imitative AI to work in (a lot of code can seem repetitive and there is a LOT of code on the web to train against), there are no signs that the real savings and productivity benefits actually exist — certainly not at a level required to make any of these companies any money off these tools.

Microsoft invested in a firm that they should have known was bullshit. After all Microsoft itself is a leader in developing imitative AI, pairs with THE imitative IA form, OpenAI, and employs a ton of extremely smart people, both as researchers and programmers. If any company should have been able to see through Builder.AI’s bullshit you would think it would have been Microsoft. I suspect that their desire to pump up their own investment by propping up firms to use their imitative AI tools coupled with the C-suite’s apparent desire to appease Wall Street by firing people either overcame or prevented any actual realistic assessment of Builder.AI. It was just hype, all the way down.

Too much of imitative AI is hype. We look at the small things it can do and then assume, because people with fancy titles at big companies tell us so, that those small things extrapolate into bigger changes and big payouts. Time and time again, we see that such expectations do not play out. Imitative AI hype is constantly thrashed by the simple reality that it is not a viable business. No amount of crowing about how imitative AI is the inevitable future changes that. The future, as we all know, is not inevitable. Otherwise, we would be watching our 3-D televisions in the Metaverse, comforted by our NFT collections. Hoping that the future inevitably favors you is wishing, not planning. And the imitative AI hypers have to do a lot of wishing to overcome the fact that the future is starting to look a lot more like 700 developers in a trench coat than a viable imitative AI business.

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