HoldMyTypeeveryone has been predicting the Singularity for decades now. The premise is we build systems that are so smart that they themselves can build the next system that is even smarter, that builds the next smarter one, and so on, and once we get that started, if they keep getting smarter faster enough, then the incremental time (t) to achieve a unit (u) of improvement goes to zero, so (u/t) goes to infinity and foom.
Anyway, I have never believed in this theory for the simple reason we outlined above: the majority of time needed to get anything done is not actually the time doing it. It’s wall clock time. Waiting. Latency.
And you can’t overcome latency with brute force.
I know you want to. I know many of you now work at companies where the business model kinda depends on doing exactly that.
Sorry.
But you can’t just not review things!
Ah, well, no, actually yeah. You really can
the pipeline gets jammed up because of too much new code spewed into it at step 1. But what's the root cause of the clog? Why doesn’t the pipeline go faster?
I said above that this isn’t an article about AI. Clearly I’m failing at that so far, but let’s bring it back to humans. It goes back to the annoyingly true observation I started with: every layer of review is 10x slower. As a society, we know this. Maybe you haven't seen it before now. But trust me: people who do org design for a living know that layers are expensive... and they still do it.
As companies grow, they all end up with more and more layers of collaboration, review, and management. Why? Because otherwise mistakes get made, and mistakes are increasingly expensive at scale
in the reality of agentic humans, it’s not so simple. First of all, the incentives get weird
Anyway, I have never believed in this theory for the simple reason we outlined above: the majority of time needed to get anything done is not actually the time doing it. It’s wall clock time. Waiting. Latency.
And you can’t overcome latency with brute force.
I know you want to. I know many of you now work at companies where the business model kinda depends on doing exactly that.
Sorry.
But you can’t just not review things!
Ah, well, no, actually yeah. You really can
the pipeline gets jammed up because of too much new code spewed into it at step 1. But what's the root cause of the clog? Why doesn’t the pipeline go faster?
I said above that this isn’t an article about AI. Clearly I’m failing at that so far, but let’s bring it back to humans. It goes back to the annoyingly true observation I started with: every layer of review is 10x slower. As a society, we know this. Maybe you haven't seen it before now. But trust me: people who do org design for a living know that layers are expensive... and they still do it.
As companies grow, they all end up with more and more layers of collaboration, review, and management. Why? Because otherwise mistakes get made, and mistakes are increasingly expensive at scale
in the reality of agentic humans, it’s not so simple. First of all, the incentives get weird
