I am interviewing with a small company that has adopted agentic development in a big way and is looking for a vp of engineering to guide things. I tried to present a balanced view of excitement for the possibilities built on first solving governance, guardrails and mitigating the lethal trifecta. Senior executives are not interested and my position likely disqualified me, even after I talked about needing to speak to your client data governance teams and CISOs. Crickets. They actually said we're looking for someone who's a big AI booster. Bullet dodged.

My perspective is to figure out how to shape the way we use AI to show the right way to use it. This comes from a place of caring about the software and its users.

I strongly believe that when used properly, AI can remove a lot of overhead that comes with writing the code (from both a critical thinking standpoint and physically it actually takes a lot more time than people realize to manually type code). You can focus on the design and have your team much more integrated in the designs and specifications of things without it being a slog to document the damn thing.

If I can go off and write up a draft and get feedback from my team in a day instead of in a week, I think that's fine. We can collectively walk through and use everyone's domain knowledge to correct details. Once everyone is onboard with the spec, I can feed that into a model to progressively do small changes rapidly but in such a way that's still manageable and reviewable for myself and the rest of my team.

If I go off and merge 45000 lines of code into main: fucking fire me and my whole team that approved that.

As with all new things that have extreme views on either side (AI is complete shit versus AI is the second coming of Christ in this case), there's generally a middle ground in between that we can collectively correct toward.

Well the customer also shouldn’t trust anyone, especially not with handling their private data.

The idea that companies invested in "safe, performant software" before AI is laughable. Tech companies have never cared about the customers beyond their effect on KPIs.

>I can't state my disdain enough for the rabid, careless advancement of AI, and all the bros that keep telling me to catch up or fall behind, while they are actively causing harm to the hundreds of thousands, or millions of users they have, without care or consideration.

Have you ever considered that the people who are pro-AI are not a monolith, and that it can be simultaneously true that you should absolutely be learning how to effectively and safely use LLMs in engineering workflows, while it is also true that there are people who are using them very unsafely?

Beig opposed to learning how to use AI correctly because some people use it recklessly is like being opposed to learning AWS in 2015 because some people left sensitive data in open S3 buckets.

Do not confuse negligent misuse of the tool for the value proposition of the tool itself.

It's surprising how different the standards are between software engineering and all other kinds of engineering, for instance civil or mechanic.

The old joke was "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization", but in the AI era it feels like a butterfly would be enough.

You won’t lose your job to AI...but to someone using AI...and they will lose everything...to someone who knows cybersecurity.

These past few years, it feels as though the brake pedal has been replaced with another gas pedal.

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