I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.
[0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.
My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".
Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.
* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.
As your respondents point out there's also been the pattern of clever algorithms being classified as "AI" until they were understood. That differentiated those selling snake oil from the serious.
I did not claim we coined AGI in response to marketers.
That's how you get Windows subsystem for POSIX. Someone in the government had a checklist saying they'd only buy a POSIX compliant operating system, so Microsoft made one. Amusingly, Linux isn't (mostly because who would pay for that certification?)
Microsoft's deliberately useless POSIX support is a result of Microsoft acting in bad faith and sabotaging the efforts, as usual, because the lock-in is what they want. Just like they did with OpenDocument, for example. And what they tried to do with Java and the web.
It seems to me to be a behavioral pattern with deep seated cultural roots. How many times have you found someone you were interacting with becoming frustrated or impatient when he couldn't immediately grasp a complex topic? How frequently have you witnessed that directly resulting in corners being cut in order to "just get on with things"? When some plurality of participants are either unwilling to spend the time they have, or are short on time, or both, the careless attitude proceeds to cascade through the network.
While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.
Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.
I would give you +100 for that if I could.
Very well-played (and worded). I think I'm going to steal that one.
That is a good idea for a project management system. Force ranking of priorities.
But once the worst bottleneck is widened to the same width as the second-worst bottleneck, you are from then on optimizing both until you reach the width of the third-worst bottleneck, and from then on you need to elevate all 3 to improve the situation, and so on.
to make it more concrete with an example:
you can identify that the friction on a bicycle comes predominantly from the front wheel, so you optimize the front wheel bearing/lubrication/... until you discover the front wheel has the same friction as the rear wheel bearings, so if you want to improve you'd have to improve both front and rear wheel friction, which helps until they have improved beyond the friction on the pedal bearings, from then on you need to improve all 3, until you discover the chain links became the friction bottleneck, etc...
How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".
And once a project starts getting a fair number of contributers political problems arise, feelings get hurt, and forks happen. Quite often the forks take the contributers leaving the original project a shell and a warning to others.
And yet - they are the one's paying you and everyone else somehow?
I think you might be missing something fundamental, start by considering that what is 'good software' is not an intrinsic measure, but a measure of what it does.
The only reason we really need 'intrinsically good' software, is if it's very long lived and a ton of people are going to come to depend on it.
People trying to make oak furniture when in most cases what we want is IKEA.
That said - AI or no AI - there's no excuse for not keeping a grip on things, whatever kind of 'grip' that might be.
+1. Straight into my quotes file.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b...:
> The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week
> ...
> Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
> But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.... When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control....
Office work isn’t objectively bad and remote work isn’t objectively good.
If you like one and dislike the other, shocker you’re going to find fault with the other side’s reasoning.
How many self-centered people have you met in your life who go, "yep, I'd call myself self-centered."
BUT if you work with people who would rather work with you in an office then you are being self-centered by putting your wishes to work remotely above their's. That is not wrong! But it is also not wrong for their wishes to include you commuting into an office.
If 2 people have different and conflicting desires, one of them is likely to end up disappointed!
Is that a reference to the "live forever" people trying to solve aging?
Very hit or miss if you’re in a group whose life expectancy sees substantial improvement in your lifetime though.
Speed itself isn't the priority. You've got to ask what the direction is. If you're working on a project that is meaningful to you personally (maybe because it is very meaningful to others you care about!) then you'll want it to be done.
If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue.
If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.
Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.
Employers are trying to turn all workers everywhere in every industry into completely fungible atomatons. This maximises the candidate pool and drives wages to a minimum. Employees who demand humane working conditions can be canned and replaced with someone more desperate.
In their ideal world we would basically bring back feudalism.
Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation.
Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation.
Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capitalism that wants infinite growth immediately.
The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.
It's not that nobody has time to read, process, or think (that's a uniquely Silicon Valley phenomenon). It's that there's no punishment for failing to read, process, or think. Hell, it seems like your slop is just as likely to be rewarded as someone else's thoughtful work. And the punishment in this case would be... not winning?
I think the punishments for cheating the system with AI slop are far too light in a lot of domains right now. We need to change the risk-reward calculus one way or another, and failing to reward good work obviously isn't a solution.
I'm not sure what the solution looks like exactly, but I'm certain it's punitive.
"Now" is too late, competition has already figured their next move out. We need to move fasterer. Broken eggs doesn't matter, the supply is constant anyway.
It's the second law of thermodynamics. People trying to achieve their lowest sustainable energy state.
Most people take the easy way out most of the time. Not that complicated.
The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn.
The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.
Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.
Do you mean that in general, or only in this specific situation?
In general it's obviously not true.
> Management represents the owners (capital.)
Only insofar as any employee represents the owners.
> Any other framing is delusional.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
You get the same dysfunctions in any organisation where the management levels are staffed by narcissists and sociopaths who need hierarchy to feel a sense of self, and need to enforce it to self-soothe.
There are political structures even more hierarchical than US corporations, and some of them punish status infractions + perceived failures with violence or death.
The problem is the dysfunctional psychology of hierarchy. The more upper levels tend to performative hierarchy and status plays, the worse everything gets.
Capital.
Slop PR? Fix the slop.
Slop design? I’m not implementing slop, fix it.
Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it.
We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together.
Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem.
I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you.
Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.
In that case I guess you just keep pressing them to document/make notes. Keep asking questions. Basically take away their “saved time” by dumping the time sink they dumped on you back on them.
There's a danger in it too because (whether it should or not) CTO title carries a level of weight that might result in less scrutiny than an IC (which it should not IMHO). I hope he is encouraging objective reviews and not pushing stuff through on his title.