Grappling With the Existential AI Threat
Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.
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.
She goes on to say that “the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.” Interesting read.
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