Everything is a Nail and AI is the Hammer

It’s been an insane year or two around AI in the development space. In my company, as with almost every one else in the world, are pushing the use of AI hard. The first to get to market with the next big thing wins the prize. What this looks like in reality is that long term support suffers, open source suffers, and we end up with an enormous amount of replicas of the same type of application.

When is the last time you actually searched to find software that solved your problem? Did you actually look to see if the thing you just spend 30M tokens building already exists?

Support

Something I don’t see talked about alot, at least out side of the Open Source community, is who will support these applications, changes, etc over the long term. We’re quickly getting to a point where there’s nobody who actually knows the code they are pushing. Sure people say they are reviewing every line, “human in the loop”, etc but the reality is that you’re going to need an LLM forever to support your deliverables.

I’m just as guilty as the next person and honestly support and long-term vision are not rewarded in the corporate world.

Just because we can.. doesn’t mean we should..

Going back to the title of this post, not everything needs AI. Let me clarify, not everything need GenAI to be successful. LLMs are non-deterministic and developers burn a lot of tokens trying to get the same or similar answers out of their applications. We want to just give some LLM all the data and say “here do X and return Y”, because developers are inherently lazy people… And before everyone gets up in arms, who here started their development career building macros because they didn’t want to have to perform the same task in Excel over and over?

Anyway what are your thoughts on using AI to solve every problem?