Re: Coffee & a Mike: AI
I found this analysis (link below) to be cogent. Key takeaways for me:
- Senior engineers and architects got their wisdom via hands-on experience (i.e lots of scars on the posterior). By cutting out junior staff, companies ensure that there will be nobody with the requisite domain expertise/experience to properly review AI-generated work products once the current “old guard” retires and dies off.
- By laying off large numbers of middle class workers, we will disrupt our consumer economy: people with no income don’t buy things.
BTW - I am a senior member of technical staff (i.e. one of the “old guard”) at a large engineering firm that is embracing the use of AI. Fortunately, the goal is not to reduce staff but to augment the current staff’s productivity. We continue to hire new junior engineers. [Upper management is frequently rational, perhaps because most of them are ex-engineers.]
We largely use Claude Code. Our experience is that it makes as many mistakes as humans, and we subject AI-generated work products to the same technical peer-review process that we use for manually created artifacts. [Many of our engineers refer to Claude as “the summer intern”]
We have been developing frameworks for complex, AI-augmented work flows that incorporate human-in-the loop gates for review and re-direction of Claude, to ensure that the results are reliable and repeatable.
Personally, I think the growth of AI will be reigned in by two factors (a) the non-sustainable economics, and (b) lack of energy. This will be a Good Thing, but when it happens is an open question.