Please stop the AI Confidence Theater
We don’t need an extra reason to be anxious
AI headlines never disappoint. First, AI was killing education (oh the good ol’ days, I miss thee). Then we moved on to eliminating writers, engineers, designers, product managers, and sales jobs - I believe in that exact order. Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Google, with its precious SEO, was on the chopping block because of AI. Then we decided to collectively eliminate SaaS. We didn’t, but the stock market believed it and lots of people lost $$$. Now we are in the middle of everyone and their mother needing an AI agent, because you are def missing out on a life changing experience if you don’t have one. And yet… 99% of people don’t even know what an AI agent even does.
Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. I strategize with it. I build products with it. I write with it. I analyze data with it. But even I feel like everyone else has cracked the AI code while I’m still using some basic tutorial version over here.
So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude. Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
It turns out that’s a super short list.
But the noise continues on volume 11/10.
So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.
(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
It is screwing a lot of stuff up
This fake AI hype is hurting all of us. This is not a victimless crime.
The reality distortion hurts innovation
The AI headline chasers and fakers are robbing people of a real, cool Ah-ha moment with AI tools that could get them excited and bought-in. The problem is when you see someone talk about their ‘life-changing’ (it’s always ‘life-changing’) new AI-powered system but… it doesn’t actually work. So you just assume that all of the AI stuff is BS and keep your head in the sand.
And instead of celebrating the saved time and reduced annoyance that AI actually can do right now, people are out here promising employee-replacing super agents… despite the fact that their agents only trigger 50% of the time and only deliver decent outputs if hand-fed very specific context (and get shit wrong most of the time)
This weird reverse-hustle hustle culture?
I didn’t have ‘Kind of misses toxic hustle culture’ on my 2026 bingo card and yet, here we are. Because now we have an even more toxic environment.
Five years ago, people wanted you to think they worked harder than everyone else. Today they want you to think AI does it all.
Five years ago, people shared and bragged about big outcomes: revenue, user milestones, fundraising, headcount. Today people are just highlighting how many tokens they’re burning. Everyone wants you to believe they have an invisible team of AI employees running their business while they think big thoughts. But where are those business outcomes, tho?!?
Five years ago, people bragged about waking up at 5am, doing cold plunges, having inbox zero, and working while endlessly Peletoning. Now it’s all about having 17 agents, not opening email, and AI running your business. It’s the exact same performance, just with different props.
Hiring for real expertise is a mess
This has also blown up the hiring process. AI has made average intelligence incredibly cheap and it has given everyone the vocabulary of expertise. It used to be that if someone started talking about vector databases, MCP, agents, memory, or RAG you assumed they knew what they were doing. Today, everyone knows the words. AI regurgitates some smart one-liner for them and 3 hot takes. Everyone sounds like they have an experience.
But sounding competent and being competent are completely different things. So how do you hire in the middle of that? Not that the old interview and hiring process was so great - I’ve been frustrated with it for years. But verbal interviews for real don’t work anymore. Just because you can ‘confidently’ explain MCP doesn’t mean you can build one or you’ve built a single workflow that anyone actually depends on. Case study and work trials become absolutely necessary to cut through the bullshit.
The FOMO is exhausting
All this leaves people feeling demoralized. Instead of getting excited about how these tools could help, it mostly just feels like we are all terribly behind and it’s all completely impossible.
Overall, our brains just can’t comprehend this level of change. Especially for people in tech, this is all happening so fast. Think about the fact that 200 years ago, we were just getting basic sanitation figured out, and now we have to figure out how to manage all-powerful (but also really inconsistent and sometimes disappointing!?) artificial intelligence that is going to help/replace our jobs? It’s just so much. We don’t need people yelling at us all the time about how we’re behind.
What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic. You stop appreciating the things that genuinely save you time because someone else claims they’ve done so much more.
Why is this happening?
There are a few big reasons that come together to make this happen: social media rewards superficial hype, the stuff AI can do is evolving faster than we can keep up, and companies are incentivizing this sort of behavior all up and down the org chart.
Problem 1: Hype gets clicks
We live in a world where attention is the currency. And that attention is generally measured in impressions. This is the dopamine hit that people are chasing - can you go viral? Can you get everyone to engage?
The way to capture attention is to say something shocking or unexpected, so everything gets exaggerated. Legitimately cool use cases get elevated from ‘This saves me 15 annoying minutes every week’ to ‘ZOMG THIS CHANGED MY LIFE’ or ‘USE THIS WORKFLOW OR YOU’LL BE PERMANENTLY UNEMPLOYED.’
Problem 2: It’s the wild west out here
When we’re talking about content creators sharing their magical use cases on LinkedIn and X, the tricky thing is that AI really CAN do crazy stuff. If it were all fake, then we could all just ignore it. But people actually are building stuff all the time that could totally change how you and I work every day. So, we can’t just ignore it.
But it’s also hard to confirm. Like, are they using a different LLM model than me? Is my data not structured right? Did I mess something up in setting up the workflow? Or… did they just fake it, and all of this is impossible? There’s no way to know.
This is not a problem that we had to deal with previous phases of tech. No one was creating ‘I just created this INSANE setup with Dropbox’ posts to try to go viral… everyone would have just looked at the description and immediately called bulllllsh*t.
Problem 3: Marketing teams are selling certainty where none exists
Traditional software was ‘easy’ to message. Click the button, get the outcome. AI doesn’t work like that. It opens up more possibilities, use cases become loosely defined, and it needs right context to succeed. Sometimes it’s incredible. Sometimes it’s just stupid or confidently wrong.
But read the landing pages and you’d think every AI product is a magical employee that never sleeps, never makes mistakes, and runs your company better than anyone else.
The thing about all this AI innovation is that it’s also the era of trust-based growth. If you over-sell, it will be discovered and no one will trust you anymore. Right now, maybe all of this hype feels like free attention and money. But if you take that route, you’ll pay for it in the end.
P.S. I don’t even blame marketing teams. They’re doing what marketing has always done: selling the best possible version of the product. The problem is that with AI, the gap between the demo and day-to-day reality can be enormous. And every exaggerated promise makes people trust the next AI product a little less.
Problem 4: Pressure from the top
Inside companies, this starts at the very top. Even above the execs - at VC level. Because the investors have been promised AI-powered miracles. And this means that execs need to demand AI-powered miracles from their employees. Which means that employees are being asked to do the impossible with (often underperforming) AI tools. Which means that employees are massively incentivized to perform the AI confidence theater to justify career progression, or maybe even protect their jobs.
Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself.
If we’re going to stop the charade, it’s gonna take a group effort.
For content: Stop sharing (and spreading) the hype.
If you’re reading this and you’re guilty of posting exaggerated nonsense about your 100x AI Agent Workflows… stop it.
The good news is that there’s plenty of amazing stuff to be done. You don’t need to make things up or exaggerate. Just go deep on the stuff you know, and spend the time to build something really cool that actually can make real impact. If you share something that seriously changes how people work, they’ll always remember you. Some clickbaity title and false promises makes you forgettable or hateable.
And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.
And do NOT amplify it unless you try it yourself. If it doesn’t work and you spread it, you’re responsible, too.
For companies: Build your foundations.
The corporate side of this is a little bit trickier. Because again, it starts at the top.
Execs: Set reasonable expectations. This means managing your investors to tell them what you can actually do. This also means setting benchmarks for your organization - creating unreasonable expectations only comes back to burn you.
Managers / Team Leads: Focus on outcomes. Show your leadership what your team can move and use AI to amplify that. Don’t just start with AI and shrug your way to how it connects to business impact. If your team is still experimenting with AI tools and workflows, give them the space to build something that will really last.
Employees: Figure out the actual impact. Ask for the time and training to get better with the AI tools that interest you! Everyone is talking about AI, but if you can actually connect it to fixing core business problems, you’ll be a real hero. Figure out how to anchor in outcomes! (Understanding and delivering this kind of impact is how you become a Hi-C, btw.)
My biggest career advice for anyone right now: spend a few hours a week trying something new with AI. It’s not a lunch, 5 mins between meetings, after work, or weekend activity. Learning AI IS the job right now. Make legitimate space for it.
Let’s just be honest & talk about the hard part
Seriously, people. Content creators. Company leaders. Employees. Marketing teams. Let’s just be honest about what we and our products can actually do with AI.
The first prompt is the fun part. The next thousand prompts is where real value is created. Let’s make sure we cover THAT part - what happens when the model changed, the prompt stopped working, the API behavior shifted, or the integration broke and no one noticed.
AI systems aren’t ‘set it and forget it.’ They’re living systems that need monitoring, evaluation, iteration, and constant tuning. That’s where the real work happens. That’s where the real value gets created. And somehow, that’s the part nobody posts about.
If you’ve built something amazing, tell people. But if you’ve built a promising prototype, say just that. We will still be excited, we promise. If your workflow saves you 20 minutes a day, celebrate that. If your AI agent still needs babysitting or constantly messes up, admit it.
AI is already the coolest tech innovation of our lives… we don’t need to pretend it’s magical too.
Edited by Jonathan Yagel.
Seriously thank you for writing this!
This: "Case study and work trials become absolutely necessary to cut through the bullshit."