I used to pay attention to Ed Zitron, exactly because he seemed to be someone who did the research, and looked at numbers. Until one day, I realized that seems to only look at numbers as long as it serves his agenda. When it doesn't, he looks away or makes the case for why the numbers are wrong, and shields himself from these "incorrect" numbers - or people who would point to anything suggesting that AI is not a total fad.

In April 2025, Zitron wrote [1] "I am sick and tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing." This was at the time when AI coding tools had already gone "mainstream" with devs, and pretty much everyone was using tools like GH Copilot, Cursor, or something similar.

So I replied with this observation, saying how, at least within software engineers, AI is being adopted faster than any technology before [2]. To stay objective, obviously I brought receipts: sharing how, based on an older survey I ran, ~75% of devs in that survey said they used AI coding tools. Zitron made fun of the small sample size (216 people), blocked, and pretended like AI had zero PMF anywhere in the world.

I stopped taking him seriously since then. And I'm wondering ever since: does he deliberately only look at numbers and facts that he can tell the AI doomer story around? Or is it more that he finds that there's not many people who are "informed sceptics", and decided to play this role?

[1] https://x.com/edzitron/status/1916903519594156407?s=20

[2] https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1916906481686921483?s=20