Comment by mike_hearn

> Do you think Steve Jobs wants a level 2 engineer to talk back to him?

Debatable. Jobs was famously keen on a culture of DRIs - directly responsible individuals - and he liked to put his reports in competition with each other. The first iPhone design emerged that way. You could argue he valued the innovation and consensus-breaking ideas of his team immensely, it didn't all come from him.

Google is another example. They created the 20% programme where individual devs were allowed to explore their own ideas, innovative or not. Managers weren't allowed to intervene. How successful/real that programme was seemed to vary by time and place, but it did exist (I used it and launched a product that way!).

At some point, some people, some of the time, have to look at the market and think "these products all suck, I know how to do it better" and often those ideas will be controversial. The iPhone was full of choices that were extremely controversial when it first came out. The 20% project I did was controversial too. I'm ever more certain that no LLM could ever design the iPhone no matter how many professors it puts out of work, simply because no production LLM you can actually buy is willing to argue against a strong consensus just because it knows it's right.