The Cake Is a Lie: Why AI Isn’t Ready

They told us AI would change everything.

It would write code.
Design websites.
Ship products.
Do what used to take teams — now, solo.

But here’s the truth no one wants to admit: The cake is a lie.

If you're building toy projects or playing with playground prompts, sure — it feels magical.
But try building something real.
Try building something simple, but precise.
Try building something you care about.

Suddenly, the whole thing breaks.

One Page. Five Days.

This week I tried to build a landing page. Just one page.
No frameworks. No cleverness. Just Tailwind, some assets, a layout I could point to and say: “Make it look like this.”

And still:

• Containers misaligned.
• Fonts and spacing subtly off.
• Class names I didn’t ask for, layouts I didn’t design.
• Entire sections restructured “for readability” I didn’t want.

I’d say “match this exactly,” and it would still try to optimize.
I’d say “no abstraction,” and it would still wrap everything in unnecessary components.
I built a prompt ritual. A ruleset. A checklist.
I even created “No Fucking Around Mode.”

Didn’t matter.

Every new prompt was another chance for drift. Another subtle breakdown in fidelity. Another few cycles lost to debugging instructions that weren’t followed in the first place.

This Wasn’t Hard. And It Still Failed.

This wasn’t an app.
Wasn’t a backend service.
No logic, no interactivity, no database.

It was a static site.

And it still took days of iteration, correction, and reclarification to get something that matched my reference. Even then, I had to step in and hand-fix parts.

So if this level of effort is required just to get one static page out the door, I have to ask:
How is any of this supposed to scale?

How are we supposed to trust multi-agent orchestration, autonomous workflows, or AI-as-dev-team abstractions when the core interaction model can’t follow basic instructions with consistency?

Interpretation Is the Enemy of Execution

The problem isn’t that AI is stupid.
The problem is that AI is always guessing.

It doesn’t “follow” instructions — it interprets them.
And every interpretation introduces entropy.

You say “match this.” It thinks “close enough.”
You say “reuse this class.” It says “or… what if we rename it to improve semantics?”
You say “don’t change anything else.” It changes something else.

The most infuriating part isn’t that it fails — it’s that it fails confidently.
The kind of failure that forces you to double-check your own instructions.
Gaslight-by-autocomplete.

The Agent Fantasy Is Just That

Everyone selling AI right now is selling a dream:
“Just describe it, and it builds.”
“Just prompt it, and it ships.”
“Just click, and your idea becomes real.”

But they’re not shipping with these tools. They’re demoing.
They’re generating Hello World landing pages and calling it a revolution.

Meanwhile, I asked for a header to match my reference and got a nested mess of invisible divs, redundant padding, and classnames I never mentioned.

So let me say this clearly:
If the AI can’t render one page correctly, it’s not ready to build anything real.

What Does Work?

Small, narrow, unambitious things:

• Extracting text from PDFs? Great.
• Categorizing spending? Reliable.
• Refactoring a known function? Pretty good.

But building?
Designing?
Orchestrating across prompts with fidelity?

Not yet. Not even close.

I Want to Believe. I Still Do.

I’m not writing this to dunk on the tools.
I use them every day.
I want them to work.
I want to believe in the potential here.

But right now, it’s too hard.
Too fragile.
Too many words to get too little reliability.

And if anyone tells me different —
that AI is ready to build production systems,
that these tools are “already good enough” —
then I have just one thing to say:

Prove it. For real.
Not a demo. Not a screenshot. Not a tweet thread.

Build something. Ship it.
Go through the friction.
Sweat the details.

Because I already did.
And I’m telling you: the cake is a lie.