This post is primarily for the people here that are forced to work with AI. But it may be interesting for everyone.

We all here are aware how bad AI is for people and the environment. During some research I found out that this effect is most likely multiplied by pure greed (no even worse then you thought).

A little bit of context: I am currently responsible for a small R&D Team (me and some trainees) for a EU managed Services provider. Because of corpo pressure we need to evaluate AI usage.

I gave multiple models, nearly all run on 150W hardware a shot. And of course I was forced to test Claude also.

And what I found buffled me: the "frontier" top nodge best of the best model by Anthropic was the only one that did not even complete the task.

It constantly violated against clear rules. All of them about code simplicity and maintainability.

For example QWEN solved the task in about 30 minutes, one shot

And this would be the bill we would have paid for Claude without any usable result.

Having a deeper look at what happens if you let different models work on an existing codebase:

Claude will introduce complexity on every change. Wasting compute and energy.

As open source models clearly can do the job, why can those super huge big models not do the job?

And I think the answer is greed:

• more tokens more money
• lock the user into your model. Make sure you can not leave anthropic.

And that cost is really high. Not only those absurdly high token prices (factor of 100 higher then open models) it burns the employees out.

Is anyone here forced to work with AI and had made similar observations?

Luckily for me, I have some influence at my job and can minimize the AI impact in every sense. And maybe such experiments and research can convince other employers to not go down this road.