AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
Simon Willison’s Weblog
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4th June 2026 - Link Blog
AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy (via) Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build great software, often in the same teams:
The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.
The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.
Charity recommends treating this as both a leadership challenge and an engineering challenge. The key issue:
There is no natural feedback loop connecting enthusiasts with skeptics.
Designing feedback loops to help "mend the gap in shared reality" between the two groups is a fascinating organizational design problem.
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This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 4th June 2026.
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