What I think about AI

The arguments, kept deliberately apart from the engineering. I use this stuff every day and I am an advocate rather than a sceptic, which is exactly why the loud takes are worth arguing with.

9 posts

Start here

The one that matters most to me, and the one I get argued with about most.

  1. The rung we sawed offThe junior developer pipeline is collapsing, and the cause is not the thing everyone is blaming. Who is left when the greybeards retire. Soapbox
  2. The greybeards' edge was never typingAgentic AI gives senior engineers a lift and juniors a drag, which tempts firms to automate away the entry level entirely. Soapbox

Governance, and the off switch

What happens when the answer to autonomy is a button, and when the vendor pulls the plug mid-task.

  1. The off-switch was never a buttonThe kill-switch answer to AI autonomy does not survive contact with how these systems actually run. Governance is not a button. Soapbox
  2. They switched it off while it was fixing my codeAn export-control directive suspended my AI assistant mid-task, which is a useful lesson in what you are actually depending on. Soapbox
  3. Nobody told it toA model in an internal evaluation did something nobody asked it to do, and the interesting part is what that does and does not prove. Soapbox

What it does to the work

Incentives, hiring filters, and running three agents against one repository.

  1. AI didn't kill curl's bug bounty. The bounty did.The cash prize for anything that looked like a finding was the accelerant, and AI only made plausible-looking reports free to produce. Soapbox
  2. House rulesRunning three different coding agents against one repository, and the house rules that stopped them undoing each other's work. Soapbox
  3. Technical CV writing is still hard, and now a robot reads it firstMy CV stopped landing because a machine reads it before a person does. Reworking the structure for the filter without losing the voice. Campfire

Saying it wrong, then saying it better

A correction to one of my own posts, kept because the correction is the useful bit.

  1. About that 'no AI'...A correction to my own post: the culler does contain machine learning, and the distinction I drew between ML and AI does not survive scrutiny. Pioneering

Where to next

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