I Will F***ing Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

Has breathless AI mania primed you for a ragey rant about overhyped technology and huckster pitchmen? Nikhil Suresh has you covered:

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your IT department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course f***ing catastrophe.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit?

There’s no such thing as a quick fix for a broken organization. And there’s no silver bullet for product excellence. AI is capable of amazing things, but you can’t shortcut great execution or ignore its very real downsides.

In another context, I often say, “High-performing teams have design systems, but having a design system won’t make you a high-performing team.” The same is true for AI.

There’s only one route to success: get your process and operations in order, understand the technologies you’re using, know their strengths and weaknesses, and above all: start with the right problem to solve.