AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

AI enthusiasts face an existential threat from competitors who adopt rapid AI integration, while skeptics face an existential threat from reliability degradation and institutional knowledge loss caused by shipping code faster than engineers can review it. Charity Majors argues that the lack of a natural feedback loop between these two groups creates a leadership and engineering challenge requiring deliberate organizational design to bridge the gap in shared reality.

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-enthusiasts-are-in-a-race-against 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