The Judgment Reservoir

What a great essay. Extremely long and it did lose my attention a bit but it conveys something important. The impact is not measured in leaps and bounds but in what you lose along the way. Working on the code for me meant I had an intuition of why things were done a certain way, track down those odd behaviours by knowing where to look. Analysing bugs and thinking of features doesn't take into consideration the strength of the architecture anymore, unless you keep that effort of understanding up.

Re: The Judgment Reservoir

#9

Post by nine_k » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

> Years ago, you had watched the same pattern play out in design. Organizations displaced design conviction with A/B testing UX changes. The system produced optimized outcomes but could not produce original ones. The designers who carried the intuition for what a product should feel like eventually left, because the system had no way of using what they knew. At the time, you noted it and moved on. It was a UX design problem. Now the same structural pattern is reproducing itself across your entire organization, and you understand it was never isolated to one department. It was an early warning you did not recognize.

One should remember that most business metrics are as approximate, or even more so, as human judgment. They are often picked because they are easy to measure, while being reasonable enough proxies. To remove human judgment because metrics are "more objective" is to forget that most metrics were also chosen subjectively, and sometimes with a clandestine desire to look better at the moment

The story is based around the AI transformation, but it's not AI-specific. It's about the organization stopping to value human judgment, to its own eventual peril. Currently there's no comparable replacement in many key areas.