AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy The enthusiasts are
not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.The skeptics are also
not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.
Charity recommends treating this as both a leadership challenge and an engineering challenge. The key issue:
There is no natural feedback loop connecting enthusiasts with skeptics.
Designing feedback loops to help "mend the gap in shared reality" between the two groups is a fascinating organizational design problem.
Via [Lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/ri4flr/ai_enthusiasts_are_race_against_time_ai)
Tags: [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [charity-majors](https://simonwillison.net/tags/charity-majors), [agentic-engineering](https://simonwillison.net/tags/agentic-engineering)