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Sometimes they even circle back to blast their pipeline several times in the same day, all thanks to AI.

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> Productivity expectations will rise (from the screenshot)

This should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise, and if they can’t provide that, get rid of them.

The headline already rubbed me the wrong way, but seeing this made me immediately cancel my Duolingo subscription. I encourage others to do the same.

That is why I try to steer away projects whose ultimate goal is to remove people jobs, automatic cash out systems, AI, ecormerce sites for big retail chains that close down their physical shops, ....

Duolingo are not the only ones, I am aware of a project where the whole translation team for internal trainings was replaced by AI automatic translation of training materials.

Any developer that celebrates AI vibe coding, is going to get some bad vides in the coming years.

> Imposing rules on developers like the requirement that they use AI for every task, no matter how small, and work through LLMs first instead of writing code feels like an idea that comes from non-developers looking to make a thought leadership splash.

Or trying to write an earnings call headline. The more you mention how much you use AI, the higher your share price climbs!

Well, even the so called best model, o3 makes huge errors, there is a lot of bark in these models, but enough bite. So if and when they see the AI is a bit less than what people project it to be, they might begin cutting back on ambitious plans.

It comes from the idea that plenty of people don't like to explore and try things out.

When I ask my collueges than you have the few enthusiasts and then the rest.

The announcement sounds like 'start learning to use These tools' not vibecoding

I think this is a common gameplay from companies which are basically reaching their peak of what they will be able to do, but they have to keep growing somehow. Duolingo is basically a dying company if you think about it, like the growth is done, the other company which recently made news, Shopify is another one of these. You do not see them 10xing their revenue in any way again, so they have to play all of these games to squeeze more from the company by basically cutting people, and these are all steps to that goal. I would expect again other companies like Dropbox to also follow a similar path.

I found it unusable due to the overbearing gamification when I just wanted to learn a language.

I've just uninstalled the app and deleted the account (sadly, I have some relatives still stuck on a yearly subscription) after having used Duolingo for years (almost 2000 days streak) and finished multiple languages (English, German, Polish, Esperanto).

Duolingo was quite an innovative platform years ago, it really led me to keep learning, but now all that's gone. I managed to save every single sentence in the last language I was learning, which I can now import into Anki, so the ad bloat won't be a problem anymore.

They can push their greediness far and beyond, until the extent they find suitable, I won't be part of that.

People like it because they are lazy and don't need to put effort into it. But the truth is, no effort, no learning.

It's gamified Anki with social pressure.

If finding proper Anki decks for languages wasn't such a massive pain in the ass (Along with navigating the weird 30€ mobile apps for it, are they official, are they not? Can a free alternative do the same?), people would use Anki a lot more.

With Duolingo you can just install, launch, pick a language and get going.

It's selling a lifestyle change, and one which is "easy" and fun.

Once you're hooked in, they gamify everything to make you feel like you're doing well. There's the leaderboards, the daily streaks, the ba-ding every time you rearrange 7 word tiles into the only possible sentence that makes any sense.

Go and look at the Duolingo subreddit. When I looked a few years ago, it's just people showing off their 3000+ day streaks.

Anki is a better tool, but its not as polished. Duolingo hooks people with all the little gamified bits, the animations, and it's self-fulfilling popularity loop. Unfortunately being polished is genuinely an incredibly important feature for the majority of people.

How could you replicate all the speaking & hearing exercises with note cards? I can't imagine how that would work.

I think, we need to step back a little in these discussions. We need to ask, what productivity gains are we hoping to find?

In any knowledge or specialised work, operating a tool faster does not give great results, rather raises the risk of error and quality decline.

Did duolingo once face existential threat because they failed to produce specific feature sometime? Did one of their feature suffer and cause user loss because it took more time for an engineer to write the actual code?

Additionally, beyond formatting and obvious logical errors, every new code should in theory need some human review, which means more automated code means longer review. Assuming code is now produce at 2x, it also balances out that review will now take 2x. Additionally review is much more mentally taxing than putting out one’s thought into code, so risk of bugs and security holes also increases in the long term.

While Software devs cost money, the job involves thinking, and that means it can’t be compared to factory work where someone is standing at next step to simply drill a screw in spotX and the next person will simply put on a cover. Despite years of effort, the attempt to make the process mirror factory floor(did anyone notice the open floor parallel to factory floors?) it failed.

While many hate to see it this way, just like a surgeon will take his time to perform a brain/heart/tumor surgery, a SWE will do thinking, planning, coding and reviews. Giving a surgeon an autonomous bot that can spread the incision area faster or perform the incision faster does not mean productivity gain, it just means the doctor still needs to plan where to make the incision, how much to spread, what to chop off, what to avoid.

> […] push these tool-use mandates without actually quantifying the impact LLM tools have on productivity

The way I have seen this “measured” is by asking (demanding) people to pull some “time saved” number out of their ass. That number is then taken as fact, without question. So the measurable productivity gains are all based on coerced people making things up, omitting instances of the LLM tools slowing things down. It’s a house of cards, and it’s going to fall after a few more months of empty promises without results. “You claimed 300% more productivity, but delivered the same amount of work, and took on this massive AI bill. What the fuck are you doing?”

LLMs are cool, but they aren’t magic. This shit is exhausting, just skip to the part where you fire a bunch a software engineers, because that’s clearly what you actually want to do :/

You are right, it doesn’t make sense. If that was a real reason then why not augment their current staff with AI tools to “scale content to more learners” and still have a sense of quality and human touch.

Encrappification at play.

You are missing a key point.. What is duolingo's success measured on? Not on how well their customers learn (they have already paid at this point).. but how much content is there (This number directly correlates to the signups). I am sure there are numbers around the subscribers vs regular content consumers and that ratio is tiny.

For a lot of these kind of apps, quantity is the quality in itself.

"I hope they can replace their customers with AI next"

But that is the final stage - AI producing digital content, AI consuming digital content, AI writing code, AI reviewing this code, AI arguing with AI on social media.

No human needed, only numbers growing.

This, responding in natively fluent speech and immersion and personalized correction, is what I hope Duo is saying by saying that they are going to rely on AI. Their current system just sets people up to fail at language acquisition.

chatGPT voice app can already talk in languages Duolingo doesn't have and will never have on their old path.

They obviously had to do this. It is already over for Duolingo. All we really need is some kind of Anki deck generator with audio and that plus the language model to have conversations with, it is over. They will look like a childish relic of the past.

I get that it's popular to slag on Duolingo, especially in language-learning communities, but Duolingo is great for getting people started.

I'm fluent in French and immigrated here about a decade ago, and I wouldn't have done that if not for Duolingo. It didn't get me anywhere close to fluent itself (Assimil was the single best resource, but no one resource can you get you to fluent), but it got me started and it got me committed. For that, I'm grateful.

I am fluent in spanish, and duolingo was really helpful at the beginner stage. When I was beginning to learn. I think between living in mexico (total immersion), consuming spanish media only, and about an hour of duolingo every night it was a tremendous boon. Mostly for learning to spell/remember gender nouns, and learning vocabulary.. I have tried other apps but the gamification also helps.

I have now been speaking spanish for 9 years and have no use for duolingo when it comes to spanish, but I always recommend it as a resource to level up when you are a beginner.

Duolingo never even claimed they teach up to fluency. How much they promiss depends on language, but most developed one ends with B1.

The fluency complaint is completely nonsensical. There is no in person class that would make you fluent, there is no textbook that would make you fluent.

It is possible to criticize Duolingo, but the fluency claim kind of show you don't know what you talk about.

I love that whenever duolingo is mentioned all the armchair educational psychologists come out of the woodwork claiming that duolingo sucks because it's too easy or too much like a game.

One of the most valuable determinants for learning a new language is regular practice. Answering 30 easy exercises correctly will do more for your language skill than 10 hard exercises of which you only answer 5 correctly.

And easy questions have the added benefit of being less tedious and convincing more people to stick to the app.

It was easy, as a French speaker, to pick up a little Spanish for the holidays.

To be honest though, the main thing that puts me off isn't the teaching quality (which is basic/so-so) but the plethora of weird patterns to keep you hooked. I don't buy the "we want you to succeed" justification. Streaks, streak freezes, begging notifications - anything to keep you looking at ads I guess.

It's a game. Think of DuoLingo as a fun introduction, a springboard for serious language learning. People I know who use it have fun, but by no means are advanced in whatever language their learning.

I hope that this backfires asap before turning into a bigger problem.

I happen to have a Duolingo account, and was once a customer. I will send an angry message to their support team of AI robbots and hope it gets carried up to the top.

> Number of people I know that used Duolingo successfully to be fluent in a new language: 0

But they say they're "the world's best way to learn a language," right there on their homepage: https://www.duolingo.com.

So either no one has ever successfully become fluent in a foreign language (because not even the best tool can be used to successfully accomplish the task), or the tech industry is full of liars and its claims cannot be trusted.

This is begging the question a bit, but yep. We all have access to LLMs, so why do we need a middleman like DuoLingo taking the output of an LLM and cluttering it up with irrelevant ads?

> keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling

Duolingo is widely regarded as more of a game than a high-quality learning experience. People obvious learn something from it, but it's a running joke almost everywhere on social media that people can be 100s of days into their Duolingo streak and still not learn much.

Getting people off of Duolingo and onto less gamified, more rigorous language learning courses is a common theme in the language learning world.

>Duolingo's educational quality high

Was duolingo ever known for high educational quality? To me duolingo's main pitch was a way to gamify language learning. Of course it became a victim of its own success as soon as you could "pay to win".

> AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?

It will be a flop. Either it won't get implemented like the C-levels dreamed in the first place and will remain policy on paper only or it will be rolled back quietly once reality hits.

"AI-first" is the "blockchain" of 2025.

Username checks out, no em-dash needed.

This is probably the wrong way to look at this.

A more interesting question is: why are we doing this? Why are people learning foreign languages?

It can be:

- To interact with other human being -> so just find a language exchange

- Because we are bored -> just find another human being

- To find a job / immigrate in an other country -> but it seems AI will replace this job you are after anyway

It is a bit the same with cars. For a long time I wished we had self driving cars because I was commuting 4, 5, 6 hours a day to earn more.

But what would I do when I will have all that money?

Probably enjoy driving an old analog car or better ride my horse everyday.

Also anybody here eating poison with the dream of growing your own food?

So always look at the big picture and you will see DuoLingo is irrelevant anyway. It is another robotic hamster wheel like Instagram and TikTok.

You are misreading. The declaration effectively does NOT quantify or prove any productivity gain. It simply alludes to a possibility by forcing to adapt a new tool which is frequently sold as productivity gain. There is no real consensus or mass scale data except businesses with executives heavily invested in the AI adjacent stocks or prefer to be called visionaries like how SAP or Adobe got lucky by moving into cloud and subscription model purely by accidentally following random hype.

Also in most software dev task, writing code is rarely if ever the bottleneck, it is the thinking, endless scrum bullcrap, management alignment, architects being too obtuse to not sign off on simpler solutions to protect their prestige, not filling empty roles, pushing teams to extreme and then suddenly deciding to throw away and start something brand new while asking why can’t the thrown away solution be adapted for the new thing or simply consulting/contracting firms intentionally prolonging the project to milk maximum billable hours.

I have actually read the entire screenshot in that tweet and to me it read 50% as non technical executive pitched by some AI vendor about how cool their tools are and 50% of clueless people finding non existent nails for their new hammer.

AI has benefits, it may give productivity gains, specially if you are sweat shops churning out customization of same ERP or wordpress theme. Just repeating productivity gain, coding landscape will change, life will be different 500 times daily because the seller of LLM(calling them the AI wholesale is deceptive, they are subset) wants you to do that, does not magically make those true. The whole trend is sickening and it needs to die.

Replacing SWE is fine, but if SWE can be replaced, the justification can be used to replace crucial things like doctors, lawyers, auditors and lots of other professionals which will kill us all.