By Barry Buck – A friend put it best over coffee this week: the world is a literal meme.
Every serious story now reads like a cartoon. Two of the richest men alive are in a three-week trial over whether one of them “stole” a charity.
The South African government published an official AI policy and forgot to check whether the research it cited was real.
We are not living in an unserious era – we’re living in a serious era run by unserious people. Welcome to clown world.
Exhibit A: Elon Musk versus Sam Altman opened in court this week. Musk’s team called OpenAI a “stolen charity” – a phrase with the dignity of a Reddit comment that happens to be the legal framing of one of the most consequential technology disputes of our time. The original founders are suing each other over whether the most powerful AI lab on Earth should have stayed a non-profit.
Exhibit B, closer to home and infinitely more embarrassing: the South African government had to withdraw its draft national AI policy after the document was found riddled with hallucinated research citations. Fake studies. Fabricated papers. The policy meant to govern responsible AI use was itself written by an AI nobody bothered to fact-check. The government that wants to regulate the technology cannot operate it well enough to draft a credible position paper. If clown world had a national anthem, this would be the bass line.
Which brings me to where I out myself. I would defend Claude with my life. Not because I think AI will save humanity – I’m on the fence about that. But because I never want to write another impact assessment, business requirements document, or solution design by hand again.
I love coding. I do not love the expectation that I deliver in a day what used to take 10 developers a month. AI is the only reason I survive that math. An Anthropic outage now ruins my delivery. We are embarrassingly dependent, and I cannot go back.
Mustard gas was once seen as a breakthrough that could save the Fatherland. AI gives similar vibes – a transformative capability in the hands of leaders who don’t seem entirely serious about what they’re holding. Expect the Dijon variety. But also: expect the work to keep getting done by the practitioners who treat the tools with the respect the headlines refuse to.
The clowns are loud. The work is quiet. Get back to it.
Barry Buck is the chief technology officer of Saucecode and Roboteur architect
www.saucecode.tech