Reminds me of a blog post from a few days ago by Melanie Mitchell on a talk she gave about the recently-passed Brian Cantwell Smith:
Judgment, he wrote, is “a form of dispassionate deliberative thought, grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action, appropriate to the situation in which it is deployed.”
On the other hand, there is reckoning: the “calculative prowess” at which AI systems already excel. AI reckoning has lead to gold medals in mathematics competitions, to generating complex code, to predicting protein structure, and even to carrying out fluent conversations. But reckoning without judgment is a dangerous thing...
> Risk is being pushed upward instead of owned locally
I don't view this as a bad thing or at least not in many contexts, in many orgs, risk is actively pushed downward. Vibe coded PR slop is poor hiring/culture blowback.
It is an amusing inversion of the situation in which higher level decisions by seniors/exec are made that then have to be implemented by lower levels in the org; with those lower levels having to smooth and mitigate the risks and negative consequences of aforementioned higher level decisions.
15k vibe coded PR? I'd just ignore and not engage. Hopefully that person gets the hint.
Also lead developer isn't the only "adult in the room", the room should be full of adults. That needs fixing (inc. up to firing people) or maybe get a new job if that is not possible.
Reminds me of a blog post from a few days ago by Melanie Mitchell on a talk she gave about the recently-passed Brian Cantwell Smith:
Judgment, he wrote, is “a form of dispassionate deliberative thought, grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action, appropriate to the situation in which it is deployed.”
On the other hand, there is reckoning: the “calculative prowess” at which AI systems already excel. AI reckoning has lead to gold medals in mathematics competitions, to generating complex code, to predicting protein structure, and even to carrying out fluent conversations. But reckoning without judgment is a dangerous thing...
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-cantwell-smith-and-t...
> Risk is being pushed upward instead of owned locally
I don't view this as a bad thing or at least not in many contexts, in many orgs, risk is actively pushed downward. Vibe coded PR slop is poor hiring/culture blowback.
It is an amusing inversion of the situation in which higher level decisions by seniors/exec are made that then have to be implemented by lower levels in the org; with those lower levels having to smooth and mitigate the risks and negative consequences of aforementioned higher level decisions.
15k vibe coded PR? I'd just ignore and not engage. Hopefully that person gets the hint.
Also lead developer isn't the only "adult in the room", the room should be full of adults. That needs fixing (inc. up to firing people) or maybe get a new job if that is not possible.
Really appreciated this perspective.
A lot of discussions focus on model capability, but much less on where judgment actually lives in a system.
What resonated with me is the idea that the real risk isn’t intelligence — it’s unstructured responsibility.
Thanks for putting this into words.
Holy smokes we're cooked.