Value Is Not Proportional to Quantity

One of the dysfunctions that AI amplifies is the software industry's obsession on output. The move to AI is all about increasing output. Robot monkeys type faster and produce more output than people. The problem, of course, is that it's never been output that's the problem. Producing a garbage product faster benefits nobody; never has. It's good outcomes (e.g., happy customers, painless improvements) that we need, not more output.

That's not to say that, within limits, producing code faster is a bad thing. For one thing, getting working code into customers' hands faster gets us better feedback sooner. But. The best way to increase speed, whether or not AI is in the picture, is to not build things nobody wants. AI often does the opposite. I was reading this morning about the huge security holes in systems created by several of the vibe-coding platforms. Nobody wants security breaches. The customers certainly don't, and ultimately, given the legal liability and loss of customer goodwill, neither does the company. The same applies to even big platforms like Amazon, getting buggier and buggier by the minute. Nonetheless, the siren call of more output seems to push companies into doing things that are not in their best interests.

The other related assumption is that more code is somehow a good thing. That's also never been true. More code adds complexity. It hides bugs. It's harder to maintain (even with an AI doing the maintaining—loading 500K lines of code into a single context to fix a bug is not only expensive, but will probably introduce five more bugs for every one you fix). We always want the smallest, simplest thing that solves exactly the problem at hand and nothing else. Ego-driven development by people who pat themselves on the back and do a happy dance every time they create more more more, without bothering to look at what, exactly, that "more" entails, gets us nowhere good.

I have to add—to head of the inevitable wild-eyed cultists—that I am far from opposed to AI assistance. I use it myself, and any software shop that doesn't avail itself of effective tools has got worse problems than an output focus. However, we have to use AI in the context of producing value; value to both the customer and to the engineers. Value is not proportional to quantity.