This is all fine and good and the sorts of conversations we were having on tradeoffs like any other engineering org. Theres always been pressure to ship, but now its that various pockets of AI Believers have popped up, egged on by a manic management, containing such beliefs that the code no longer matters, that it’s possible to move fast and fix it up later, human review isn’t important anymore, and that lines of code is a valuable metric.

Those running projects with these beliefs are sputtering and producing impressive PoCs that struggle to make it into production - either through underestimating the amount of detail needed to scale, or often throwing away good practices in favor of letting LLMs handle tradeoffs that later make changes slow to a crawl.

Theres plenty of good ways to utilize LLMs to speed things up, but so many teams got so incentivized by management to move fast at any cost that they’ve thrown out “load-bearing” good practices for software. That bet hasn't been paying off the way they’d hoped. It’s now clear that they thought they’d be able to massively downsize the engineering orgs. Massive token spend is giving very little RoI and now like other companies they’re trying to rein in the biggest spenders who are often not producing value.