We are all Fucked: An Android Developer’s Guide to the Post-AI Apocalypse

The illusion of Artificial Intelligence is dominating Android development, driven by hype over reality. As companies rush to embrace AI to save hypothetical costs, we are left cleaning up a dumpster fire of unscalable slop.

Real engineering relies on the pains and learnings that we as engineers have accumulated over the years, it takes experience of failure and learnings not to figure out what to build, but what not to build. I'm not going to tell you how to use AI for your advantage, I'm not going to tell you how best to use AI tools.

Mostly, we can try to temper our relationship with AI, sometimes we can use it to our advantage, sometimes we can even manage upwards (though rarely). Sometimes, we can even distract our managers by giving them safe arenas to play with, like a child with an adult colouring book.

But perhaps, we can just laugh and make a joke about the collective hell we've found ourselves in.

Transcript

1. We are all Fucked An Android Developer’s Guide to the Post-AI Apocalypse ! Droidcon Berlin - October '26 ashdavies.dev
2. 20th Television Animation
3. ashdavies.dev
4. February 2026 March 2026 April 2026 May 2026 June 2026 July 2026 August 2026 September 2026 October 2026 Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 Google - Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google - Gemma 4 OpenAI GPT-5.5 Instant Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 Google - Gemini 3.7 Flash Google - Gemini 3.1 Pro Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 Google - Gemini 3.5 Flash Anthropic Claude Mythos 5 Preview Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 & Mythos 5.1 Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 (Upcoming) OpenAI GPT-5.4 & GPT-5.4 Pro OpenAI GPT-5.6 Series (Sol, Terra, Luna) OpenAI GPT-5.3-Codex Mistral - Mistral Small 4 OpenAI GPT-5.5 & GPT-5.5 Pro Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 Meta - Llama 4 Scout / Maverick Google - Gemini 3.6 Flash Anthropic Claude Opus 5 DeepSeek DeepSeek V4-Flash xAI - Grok 4.6 Google - Gemini 3.8 Flash & Gemini 3.8 Live OpenAI - GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol & Luna Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 & Sonnet 5.5 OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol ashdavies.dev Google - Gemini 3.5 Pro (Scheduled)
5. ashdavies.dev
6. Anthropic
7. Google Earth ashdavies.dev !
8. reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/anthropic-tells-investors-it-will-be-profitable-second-straight-quarter-ft-2026-09-13/
9. WeWork claimed to be profitable ... and it turned out that it was only “profitable” if you removed things like “some of the costs of doing business.” wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/
10. Why are we fucked? ashdavies.dev
11. Hype Driven Development "How I learned to stop worrying and love the failures" ashdavies.dev
12. Solutions Looking for a Problem ashdavies.dev
13. Familiarity / Risk Aversion • Dependency discomfort • Lack of maturity • Learning curve ashdavies.dev
14. Decision Fatigue ashdavies.dev !
15. Law of the Instrument “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” — Abraham Maslow ashdavies.dev
16. Developmental Development • Novel solutions require creativity • Training through experimentation ashdavies.dev
17. Knowledge Sharing ashdavies.dev
18. ! Berlindroid @ c-base ! Londroid DevFest GDG ashdavies.dev
19. Story Time "Terraform" jamescullimore.dev/5-minute-bedtime-stories-for-android-devs.html
20. "Today I Fucked Up" ashdavies.dev !
21. Understanding the Journey ashdavies.dev
22. Understanding the Process ashdavies.dev
23. ! ashdavies.dev
24. Comprehension Debt anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills | addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt
25. ashdavies.dev
26. AI "Reasoning" ashdavies.dev
27. Truly, the only winning move is not to play youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY
28. How fucked are we? Terminator Genisys
29. Paperclip Maximiser ashdavies.dev !
30. Getty Images
31. x.com/DavidRBellamy/status/2099187370407112758
32. Bad Actors ashdavies.dev !
33. 20th Century Animation
34. gitclear.com/aiassistantcodequality2025_research
35. "Good Enough" ! ashdavies.dev
36. Idempotency Predictability ashdavies.dev
37. Hallucination Testing ashdavies.dev !
38. AI productivity gains: More modest than expected getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-more-modest-than-expected/
39. 45% of code samples failed security tests and introduced OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities into the code veracode.com/blog/genai-code-security-report/
40. bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/openai-s-nvidia-amd-deals-boost-1-trillion-ai-boom-with-circular-deals
41. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/is-the-flurry-of-circular-ai-deals-a-win-winor-sign-of-a-bubble-8a2d70c5
42. The AI boom propping up markets could trigger the next crash, central banks warn euronews.com/2026/06/29/the-ai-boom-propping-up-markets-could-trigger-the-next-crash-central-banks-warn
43. ipc2u.com/articles/knowledge-base/ram-prices-2026/
44. Across the ecosystem, new devices are maintaining or even decreasing their physical memory capacity in response to memory price increases android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/08/app-broader-memory-limits.html
45. Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace futurism.com/future-society/college-critical-thinking-ai
46. How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI? pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/
47. Is AI quietly killing itself – and the Internet? forbes.com.au/news/innovation/is-ai-quietly-killing-itself-and-the-internet/
48. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) Mad Cow Disease cdc.gov/mad-cow/php/animal-health/index.html
49. "AI" isn't intelligent ashdavies.dev
50. Anthropomorphism ashdavies.dev !
51. youtube.com/watch?v=iitq4Zrphdk
52. Enshittification aka Platform Decay pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guysti
53. ashdavies.dev
54. ashdavies.dev
55. "Claude wrote it, so it should be fine right?" • WAT • No. • WTF? • GTFO • O_o ashdavies.dev
56. "I'm out of tokens!" ashdavies.dev
57. AI Burnout ashdavies.dev !
58. Do I belong in tech anymore? — Ky Decker ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout
59. Leave Me Behind — Adam McNeilly androidessence.com/leave-me-behind/
60. Guardrails ashdavies.dev
61. x.com/lukaspet/status/2104634759339298930
62. ashdavies.dev
63. "We Must Pace the Frontier" — Dario Amodei darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
64. "It is more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs, and it could end in human extinction," businessinsider.com/former-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon-self-automatation-researchwork-2026-10
65. Anthropic warns of ‘catastrophic’ AI risks in its own IPO filing theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1001838/anthropic-ipo-prospectus-ai-safety-threat
66. ‘Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.’ theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1002584/trump-us-ai-safety-deal-self-regulation-tech-execs
67. Why AGI Will Not Happen — Tim Dettmers timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/
68. LLMs Can't Program — Samir Talwar functional.computer/blog/llms-cant-program
69. The illusion of a post abundance society ashdavies.dev
70. Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/five-us-tech-giants-hidden-debts-soar-to-1.65tn-on-opaque-ai-funding
71. Photo by Braedon McLeod on Unsplash
72. 20th Television Animation
73. 2008 Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis • 8.8 million U.S. jobs lost (unemployment rose to 10%) • 10 million U.S. homes lost (house prices dropped by 20-30%) • $700 billion rescue package ($11.3 billion misused) • ~ 400 low level lenders prosecuted • 1 Wall St. exec jailed • 0 CEOs arrested federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-and-its-aftermath | pbs.org/newshour/economy/business-jan-june08-mortgage_06-19
74. What the fuck can we do? ashdavies.dev
75. Agentur für Arbeit Bildungsgutschein / Umschulung • Elektrofachkraft • Sanitärfachkraft • Bauwerkfachkraft • Malerfachkraft ashdavies.dev !"
76. © Thünen-Institut/Johan Schütte
77. Getty Images
78. OSS to the rescue! ashdavies.dev
79. ashdavies.dev
80. Work / Life Balance ashdavies.dev
81. Build for disposability ashdavies.dev !
82. Understanding the Machine ashdavies.dev
83. Owning Your Code ashdavies.dev
84. IKEA Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash !
85. Vendor Lock-In ashdavies.dev !
86. Photo by Ash Davies
87. Cloud and AI Development Act EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) General Data Protection Regulation digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cloud-and-ai-development-act
88. Please Stop Authoring With Ai — Alec Kazakova aleckazakova.com/posts/please-stop-authoring-with-ai/
89. Stay Curious, Stay Creative ashdavies.dev
90. 20th Television Animation
91. Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash
92. It's hard to be good at your tech job right now — Jonas Downey jonas.do/writing/2026-06-06-your-tech-job/
93. Thank You! ashdavies.dev xkcd.com/2228/