zerosleeps

This is a great article by No One’s Happy. Like the author, I’ve been struggling to articulate my thoughts on the explosion of use of large language models and I think this post gets as close as any that I’ve read.

This is the part of the phenomenon I find hardest to write about. The tool did not make him a worse colleague. It made him able to impersonate, for months, a discipline he had never trained in, and the impersonation was good enough that the institutional incentives all bent toward letting him continue. Perhaps it’s a failure of management, but I have been finding management to be so eager to embrace AI that they’re willing to accept the risk.

I am yet to be convinced that AI poses a serious long-term threat to my industry. This might age like milk, but I’m quietly confident that in about 3 years from now - when all these little bits of software built by people who don’t know what they don’t know and which have quietly become critical components of their respective businesses, start to fail/require changes/shit the bed because of bugs and security flaws - demand and respect for professional human software developers will be higher than ever.

The downstream costs are accumulating quickly … What is less remarked upon is the same dynamic playing out inside organizations: time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.