Comment by 2001zhaozhao
1 month ago
> Speed without judgement is a liability
So, what's the alternative?
Speed without judgement? (Maybe you'll be fine. Or maybe your business gets run to the ground by spaghetti code piling up beyond any hope for human review and quality controls breaking)
Judgement without speed? (That startup next door led by a 4-people visionary team and a bunch of AIs stomps over your 100-person company in ability to ship)
Judgement + speed at the same time? (layoff most of your employees and keep only the visionaries? how do you even filter for people who can make good decisions?)
I think the judgement angle is the only interesting part of this article, and the piece worth pursuing is automating the judgement where possible.
> That startup next door led by a 4-people visionary team and a bunch of AIs stomps over your 100-person company in ability to ship
That sounds right but is it actually true? By that I mean shipping faster. First mover advantage is a thing, but it's not the only thing, and that's also not the same as shipping additional features quickly.
I mean, Apple is famous for being purposely late to entire markets, and they're doing pretty well...
This mentality is just "move fast and break things", and just because it's a common trope in the SFBA doesn't make it effective across the board.
Note: I am assuming that it is 2027-28 and reliable AI automated coders exist (or the equivalent workhorse AI in your field), which makes implementation time negligible compared to making decisions. The effect is somewhat weaker with present-day-level AIs. I'm also assuming that the 100-person company is very competent with AI outside of making decisions, but that the startup can plan things much faster due to not needing a committee to do so.
Very rough maths:
If your 100 person team still follows collaborative processes to cancel out errors (let's say it takes 10 people a day to decide on a single deliverable's shape), then give the design to the AI to implement (as we assume the AI can do it without supervision), then you can ship 10 deliverables a day.
At the same time, that 4 people team can have all of them bouncing ideas off of AIs to help them make decisions in rapidfire all day. They'll each individually spend an hour working on a decision then hand it to an AI. Their decisions are on average as good as your 10-member team meetings because while your medium-sized company's decisions sometimes end up suboptimal due to politics, the startup's decisions are individuals so make the wrong call more often, and I assume these two effects cancel out. In that case, your competitor with 4 people cranks out 32 deliverables a day assuming that the implementation AIs don't have to be supervised at all.
In summary it's not "move fast and break things", it's just "move fast, focus on making decisions, delegate everything else to the AI". Remember that the decisions are all that matters if the AI can do all the implementation.
Mmm, thats a lot of assumptions that all have to hold true to make the math work, like, you're starting to venture into hiring 9 women to make a baby in a month territory here.
But it also makes some more fundamental assumptions that I'm trying to challenge a bit. It assumes delivering 32 "deliverables" per day (the meaning of which is context specific) is better than 10. Is that always true? Is that delta the most relevant factor in the success of a business compared to its competitors? Etc.
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