Comparing AI to steel production in the Great Leap Forward seems unfair. It's not some communist plan - it's a capitalist free for all similar to the industrial revolutions in the UK/US. It won't lead to a famine, it'll lead to the chaotic creative destruction capitalism usually produces.
The AI Great Leap Forward
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Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#32[deleted]
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#33>A prompt template behind a REST endpoint is not a model.
Not pulling any punches over there. It does feel like 95% of the "AI industry" consists of wrappers and associated tools.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#34Oh 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.
The buzzwords you cite are the vulnerabilities of the corporations which predator consultancies rely on to make sales. I don't know that the corporate world is 'about' those things so much as it suffers from them.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#35Liked the article in general, but > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch. Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address,…
AIs don’t produce well organized code. They duplicate effort, which is tech debt. Maybe one day they will be able to clear their own tech debt. And who knows, maybe they’ll still be heavily subsidized by VC money then.
Having them clear it is trivial. I have my harness refactor automatically on a steady cadence, something I could never afford to take the time to do manually.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#36Liked the article in general, but > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch. Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address,…
AIs don’t produce well organized code. They duplicate effort, which is tech debt. Maybe one day they will be able to clear their own tech debt. And who knows, maybe they’ll still be heavily subsidized by VC money then.
You can organise the code well once, template that and put guardrails in place for it to follow the structure you and the team have agreed is good. The engineering task becomes building the system that is capable of building the system to a high standard.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#37Liked the article in general, but > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch. Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address,…
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 ~…
I'm seeing similar process but on large teams still finding this output to be unmaintainable.
The problem is that vanishingly few people actually understand the code and are asking the agents to do all of the interpretation and reasoning for them.
This code that you've built is only maintainable for as long as you are still around at the company to work on it -- it's essentially a codebase that you're the only domain expert in. That's not a good outcome for companies either.
My prediction is that the companies that learn this lesson are the ones that are going to stick around. LLMs won't be in wide use for features but for throwaway busy-work type problems that eat lots of human resources and can't be ignored.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ~…
I'm seeing similar process but on large teams still finding this output to be unmaintainable. The problem is that vanishingly few people actually understand the code and are asking the agents to do all of the interpretation and reasoning for them. This code that you've built is only maintainable for as long as you are still around at the company to work on it -- it's essentially a codebase that you're the only domain…
I left my last company job just before "AI-first engineering" became mainstream, and you confirmed what I was feeling all this time - I have absolutely zero idea how teams actually manage to collaborate with LLM-managed projects. All the projects that I'm working now are my own and the only reason why I could do this is because I had unlimited time and unlimited freedom. There's no chance I would be able to do this in a team setting.
I'm positive that the last company's CEO probably mandates by now that nobody must write a single line of code by hand and there's likely some rigid process everyone has to follow.
Fun times ahead.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suppose they do somehow collapse. How does that cause wider problems? Their competitors will pick up customers.
If they collapse, then because their value proposition doesn’t add up. It’s unclear why that should be different with their competitors then.
It looks like nobody is collapsing, but OpenAI might be behind Anthropic now:
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/ai-enterprise-revenue-anthr...
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm seeing similar process but on large teams still finding this output to be unmaintainable. The problem is that vanishingly few people actually understand the code and are asking the agents to do all of the interpretation and reasoning for them. This code that you've built is only maintainable for as long as you are still around at the company to work on it -- it's essentially a codebase that you're the only domain…
I left my last company job just before "AI-first engineering" became mainstream, and you confirmed what I was feeling all this time - I have absolutely zero idea how teams actually manage to collaborate with LLM-managed projects. All the projects that I'm working now are my own and the only reason why I could do this is because I had unlimited time and unlimited freedom. There's no chance I would be able to do this i…
I agree and commiserate. In the near term my picture is pretty grim. There's fantastic uses for these tools but they're being abused.
I was big on correctness, software safety (think medical devices, not memory) and formal proofs anyway, so I think I'm just going to take the pay cut and start selecting for those types of jobs. Your run of the mill SaaS or open source+commercial companies are all becoming a death march.