Every large corporation is stuck in communication problems and approval processes. They have grown so large as to have minimal alignment between what the company attempts to produce, what makes the company profitable, and what people actually do. Enshittification, The Gervais Principle, Bullshit Jobs. Pick your favorite, flawed way to look at what is going on, it's all blind people touching different parts of the same elephant.

The way AI makes your processes go faster will have little to do with cutting software development time in itself, but by letting an organization be made with fewer people, which in itself lowers your misalignment issues. A giant company of 200K people will still be about as messy as one today, but you might be able to do a lot more with the same number of people, just like a lone programmer today, without AI, already does quite a bit more than anyone could do by themselves the 80s.

Maybe some of the advantages are that you don't need quite as many developers, or maybe you can use a smaller marketing team, or you don't need to spend that much time answering questions, because an LLM is doing it for you, and it's tracking what it's been asked of it, turning the questions into product research. Either way, the gains come from being able to run leaner, and therefore minimizing organizational misalignment.

While this is true, it doesn’t stop businesses being overzealous with AI. It’s a compound issue of a decade of ZIRP, grow at all costs and then covid overhiring and AI is suddenly poised as some kind of magical panacea.

The broader issue is the sheer number of businesses that build massively overcomplicated stacks, bought heavily into bandage solutions like AWS lambda, got on dumb tech bandwagons like big data, nosql etc. This is just another one.

I think you can engineer yourself into being leaner, in some businesses AI will help but we’ve had over a decade of “we can just add more complexity” and it just does not work.

I’m a rails guy. People forget for every unicorn there’s 10 9 figure businesses just ticking away on some niche with a VPS, rails and like 4-10 devs.