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AI removed the speed limit

AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.

There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR.

The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained eye, it works.

If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something somewhat functional. So what do they do? They keep going. Again and again. Until the project reaches a point where no one knows how anything works.

Just like someone buying a new luxury car on a credit card. You don't see the debt. You just see the car that looks great.

“Bad engineers always existed”

The difference is the speed.

It is the difference between crashing at 30 km/h and crashing at 200 km/h. Before AI, a bad engineer would struggle to produce code that even compiled. When they did produce something, it took them a long time and the blast radius was limited. The damage was bounded by how fast a human could type.

Now a bad engineer can produce 10,000 lines of working code before lunch. The damage we can do in an afternoon used to take them months. The speed at which bad decisions compound has changed completely while the speed at which you can fix them has not.

“Will anyone actually care?”

They will care when nothing works, nobody seems able to fix it, building new features takes forever and every change breaks something somewhere else.

This was already happening before AI. But now, a lot more companies that previously might have taken many years to reach an unmaintainable state can get there in just a few months.