AI - The Good The Bad The Ugly

[RustVendor]

I selected “Good” but it’s closer to “Both” for me. I just didn’t like the “hate it” framing.

I use it enthusiastically and it has helped me solve larger, more complex problems at a much faster rate.

Like most things in life it’s just a tool and how we use it determines whether it’s ultimately helpful or destructive.

By far, the biggest problem to solve in tech is stability. It's wild that we have come this far and computers still barely work, every time it comes close new "features" are added which increase complexity and we always exist on the bleeding edge. That's why I critique vibe coding, we have plenty of ideas for new features but they aren't worth a damn if they just make things work poorly. The underlying tech is what allows features to be stable. It's the difference between Amazon AWS and Microsoft products. Amazon has always prioritized stability whereas MS is constantly adding broken features.

 

[john_marsten_1873]

By far, the biggest problem to solve in tech is stability. It's wild that we have come this far and computers still barely work, every time it comes close new "features" are added which increase complexity and we always exist on the bleeding edge. That's why I critique vibe coding, we have plenty of ideas for new features but they aren't worth a damn if they just make things work poorly. The underlying tech is what allows features to be stable. It's the difference between Amazon AWS and Microsoft products. Amazon has always prioritized stability whereas MS is constantly adding broken features.

The stability vs. innovation problem will always exist. I’ve iterated between what I like to frame as technologist vs. builder often, where I’m hyper focused on the tools vs. product/outcome: clean code, low tech-debt vs. spending more time on features that customers/users are asking for.

And of course, I’ve been on the aide of neglecting tech cleanup has directly impacted our ability and/or speed to release important features that depended on a new customer contract and renewal. Also, the dreaded “well the prototype works so I don’t think we should just throw away that work.” from the execs.

Right now, the market is favoring builders: finding meaningful use cases for AI. And the reality is that it can be fruitful for both engineers and vibe coders. There’s a lot of great ideas out there that previously, folks had to spend $5-10k to hire an engineer just to prototype. Now, there’s never been a better opportunity for non-technical folks to build a proof of concept and parter up to build something that could scale to at least the first 100k users.

AWS won because of their innovation and aggressiveness toward capturing market-share. Too many people were comfortable with “we’re a Microsoft shop” and Microsoft wasn’t going to rush folks toward cloud infra and compute.

The reality that there has to be enough stability to drive enough innovation so you don’t get disrupted. These days, I regularly push back against tech debt cleanup or new tech, proposals that don’t clearly unblock/unlock product features or meaningfully and measurably improve development speed and productivity.

 

[ikeo1]

The stability vs. innovation problem will always exist. I’ve iterated between what I like to frame as technologist vs. builder often, where I’m hyper focused on the tools vs. product/outcome: clean code, low tech-debt vs. spending more time on features that customers/users are asking for.

And of course, I’ve been on the aide of neglecting tech cleanup has directly impacted our ability and/or speed to release important features that depended on a new customer contract and renewal. Also, the dreaded “well the prototype works so I don’t think we should just throw away that work.” from the execs.

Right now, the market is favoring builders: finding meaningful use cases for AI. And the reality is that it can be fruitful for both engineers and vibe coders. There’s a lot of great ideas out there that previously, folks had to spend $5-10k to hire an engineer just to prototype. Now, there’s never been a better opportunity for non-technical folks to build a proof of concept and parter up to build something that could scale to at least the first 100k users.

AWS won because of their innovation and aggressiveness toward capturing market-share. Too many people were comfortable with “we’re a Microsoft shop” and Microsoft wasn’t going to rush folks toward cloud infra and compute.

The reality that there has to be enough stability to drive enough innovation so you don’t get disrupted. These days, I regularly push back against tech debt cleanup or new tech, proposals that don’t clearly unblock/unlock product features or meaningfully and measurably improve development speed and productivity.

There’s always a balance. It’s not just in tech, but any product in general. If it’s useful, it’ll grow. It’s just easier to get it built now. If it’s not, it’s garbage, which most people are producing because now everybody has access to the tool, and you get a lot of trash. That doesn’t mean the tech is bad or the tech fault. You can’t blame the technology and people’s understanding of it when the average education is going down.

 

[RustVendor]

The stability vs. innovation problem will always exist. I’ve iterated between what I like to frame as technologist vs. builder often, where I’m hyper focused on the tools vs. product/outcome: clean code, low tech-debt vs. spending more time on features that customers/users are asking for.

And of course, I’ve been on the aide of neglecting tech cleanup has directly impacted our ability and/or speed to release important features that depended on a new customer contract and renewal. Also, the dreaded “well the prototype works so I don’t think we should just throw away that work.” from the execs.

Right now, the market is favoring builders: finding meaningful use cases for AI. And the reality is that it can be fruitful for both engineers and vibe coders. There’s a lot of great ideas out there that previously, folks had to spend $5-10k to hire an engineer just to prototype. Now, there’s never been a better opportunity for non-technical folks to build a proof of concept and parter up to build something that could scale to at least the first 100k users.

AWS won because of their innovation and aggressiveness toward capturing market-share. Too many people were comfortable with “we’re a Microsoft shop” and Microsoft wasn’t going to rush folks toward cloud infra and compute.

The reality that there has to be enough stability to drive enough innovation so you don’t get disrupted. These days, I regularly push back against tech debt cleanup or new tech, proposals that don’t clearly unblock/unlock product features or meaningfully and measurably improve development speed and productivity.

That's the thing though, stability is a feature in and of itself. As someone forced to use Microsoft products, the fact that even their basic office tools like Word and Even F-ing Outlook are constantly bugging out is a lot more meaningful than the fact they they integrated copilot. most work isn't using new features it's using the core functions. Like why are we taking about AI when Word can barely support an online spreadsheet. Why is the answer so much of the time to just copy and paste into a new document? That's literally what MS support tells you because they don't know either. Everything from our phones to what should be a fairly basic email reader is still constantly bugging. I literally don't need any new features just make the core functions work.