And here’s the kicker: most people don’t care how something was made, only whether it works.
On the surface, a lot of things do “work, even when they’re held together with duct tape and wishful thinking.
As engineers, we care about what’s under the surface: the process, the pipelines, the architecture, the tests. But to most people, only the result matters, not the craftsmanship, not the automation, not the long nights debugging CI.
Kent Beck, one of the creators of Agile, described AI as an Unpredictable Genie immensely powerful, but prone to mischief if left unchecked.
And that’s our role:
To tame the Genie.
- Enforce checklists
- Write meaningful tests
- Be the quality gate.
You might not be the most popular person in the room.
But responsibility isn’t about popularity, it’s about doing the right thing, even when it’s invisible.
I enjoyed this post. This is the reason why I’m designing my own apps to the detailed level and only then letting AI write the code to match my specifications. I need to understand the design that thoroughly because it’s my duty to ensure that it’s solid. Ultimately, many are using AI as a means to abdicate responsibility for their work/roles and that isn’t sustainable for very long.
Within the upcoming fall of a lot of the technology industry due to AI "helping" with things we already don't understand is an opportunity: someone with some cash, hiring those experienced senior devs who DO understand and then out-competing the failing companies who tied their survival to the hallucination engines. Someone will come out on top, and it won't be the ones using the LLM systems.
Common sense isn’t that common.
And here’s the kicker: most people don’t care how something was made, only whether it works.
On the surface, a lot of things do “work, even when they’re held together with duct tape and wishful thinking.
As engineers, we care about what’s under the surface: the process, the pipelines, the architecture, the tests. But to most people, only the result matters, not the craftsmanship, not the automation, not the long nights debugging CI.
Kent Beck, one of the creators of Agile, described AI as an Unpredictable Genie immensely powerful, but prone to mischief if left unchecked.
And that’s our role:
To tame the Genie.
- Enforce checklists
- Write meaningful tests
- Be the quality gate.
You might not be the most popular person in the room.
But responsibility isn’t about popularity, it’s about doing the right thing, even when it’s invisible.
I enjoyed this post. This is the reason why I’m designing my own apps to the detailed level and only then letting AI write the code to match my specifications. I need to understand the design that thoroughly because it’s my duty to ensure that it’s solid. Ultimately, many are using AI as a means to abdicate responsibility for their work/roles and that isn’t sustainable for very long.
Within the upcoming fall of a lot of the technology industry due to AI "helping" with things we already don't understand is an opportunity: someone with some cash, hiring those experienced senior devs who DO understand and then out-competing the failing companies who tied their survival to the hallucination engines. Someone will come out on top, and it won't be the ones using the LLM systems.
Amazing essay!
couldn’t resist clicking after reading the title!
AI will "hack" all of us.
I think you mean that AI will augment all of us…but it doesn’t necessarily mislead/hijack the way it does with “Agile” project management tools.