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

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build great software, often in the same teams: 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 Tags: ai , charity-majors , agentic-engineering