AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy (xpost) – charity.wtf

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Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. There is a way to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.. Xposted from substack.

I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding. Difficult engineering problems solved, backlogs cleared. Rewrites that would have taken a year or more in the beforetimes, now whipped out in a few short weeks of prompting. Afterwards, wandering around the conference, I caught a lot of excited chatter:

“I can’t wait to make my teams watch the recording of this talk. My engineers are SO resistant to the idea of shipping code without reading it. Finally, some proof they can’t ignore!”

“Mine are too. It’s so frustrating. People are just so stuck in what they know. I think they’re just scared of being replaced, you know?”

The talk was fantastic. The presenter made it all sound easy, breezy and oh-so-fun.

The problem is, I know lots of other people at his company, and they described these projects as a horror show. Yes, they allowed, some progress was made, and some of it was pretty cool, but he also left a long, fiery trail of chaos in his wake. Months later, some teams were still grinding through waves of cleanup work.

(Please don’t @ me to ask if I am subtweeting your talk. I am subtweeting MANY TALKS. This is a composite.)

I keep thinking back to this episode — the highly selective version of the story that was told on stage, and the room full of AI enthusiasts who seemed to be eating it up with a spoon, uncritically, because it so validated everything they wanted to be true.

I keep thinking about the certainty they took home with them, and wondering how that energy fed into conversations with their teams.

People are retreating into camps and circling the wagons

There is a yawning chasm opening up between…oh, let’s call them the enthusiasts and the skeptics, although the battle lines are drawn in many different ways. Both groups are tense, frustrated, and a little scared, and as a result, they have stopped talking to each other. Instead, they talk about each other — as roadblocks, as caricatures, as threats. It’s all,

“THOSE people are AI-pilled and don’t understand software”, vs

“THOSE people hate AI and don’t want to move fast.”

This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find.

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.

I am writing for solid teams that are doing the work

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about who I’m writing for. This is not about teams whose management chain is disconnected from engineering realities or paying for McKinsey consultants, or teams with low engineering discipline and trust.

I am not writing for tiny baby startups with no customers or revenue, and I am not writing for behemoths who are on the verge of busting through the red tape to finally get a Claude license.

I am writing for relatively high-performing teams that are transforming from pre-AI to AI-native. These are teams with engineering discipline and skill who care deeply, who are struggling precisely because there are so many legitimate, competing threats and no obvious answers.

I’m talking about the happy case, in other words. It’s still hard as shit.

There is no natural feedback loop connecting enthusiasts with skeptics

The wins are real, the costs are real. This ought to be a fruitful source of tension, where skeptics and enthusiasts join up to solve hard problems with their powers combined, Powerpuff Girls-style.

The problem is, the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.

That conference talk I mentioned? I doubt the speaker was intentionally misleading us. They might not even...