The AI Great Leap Forward

Agreed, but it's a bit nuanced. I'm working on a fairly complex project now in a domain where I have no technical experience. The first iteration of the project was complete garbage, but it was garbage mainly because I asked for things to be done and never asked HOW it should be done. Result? Complete, utter garbage. It kinda, sorta worked, but again, I would never use it in anything important.

Then we went through ~10 complete rewrites based on the learnings from previous attempts. As we went through these iterations, I became much more knowledgeable of the domain - because I saw failure points, I read the resulting code and because I asked the right questions.

Without AI, I would likely have given up after iteration 2, and certainly would not do 10 iterations.

So the nuance here is that iterating and throwing away the entire thing is going to become much cheaper, but not without an engineer being in the loop, asking the right questions.

Note: each iteration went through dual reviews of codex and opus at each phase with every finding fixed and review saying everything is perfect, the best thing on earth.

Haven’t you heard? Putting in effort is not cool any more. The best they can do is ask an LLM to edit it down.

Oh god, don't get me started on this. The article goes full opera-level tragedy, like we're all marching into some corporate gulag where AI eats our souls and the lights go out forever. "The famine comes later" my ass. It's peak doomer porn, written to make you feel like the sky is falling instead of just another round of executive circle jerking.

The corporate world has always been 80% lies, fake KPIs and theatre. "Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does.

Yes, the corporate bullshitry has been turbocharged with AI now. But it's nothing new and nothing that much tragic. At the very least the same AI can help me finally release personal projects that have been collecting dust for years. Who knows what the future will bring. I'd be much more worried of oil supply chokehold than of AI turbo circus in the corporate world. No oil means not having enough food tomorrow; or medical supplies. My child might die because of this. But AI temporarily causing perturbations at work is just another round of corporate theatre. Been there many times.

Employment danger is real, but not apocalyptic. Some jobs will evaporate, sure. But even as the same articles states, now once thing ("AI know-how") replaced another thing ("domain knowledge siloing"). The corporate machine still needs warm bodies for the messy human parts: sales, talking to customers (customers hate talking to a robot, what a fucking surprise), covering ass. I would say, covering ass is the most important one, along with delegating the project management to someone else below on the corporate hierarchy, so upper management wouldn't have to work and would only keep asking for status updates. They would always need someone to type the actual AI requests. It's not like top management or VP would ever do that, neither they would ever run it automatically, since AI can delete production (happened many times), and they don't want to be the scapegoats.

So yeah, the article is overdramatic trash for clicks. AI is just another round of that circus. The "famine" won't be real, it'll be a bunch of overpromises, just as usual. Same as it ever has been.

If they collapse, then because their value proposition doesn’t add up. It’s unclear why that should be different with their competitors then.