I've Never Trusted Fast.
AI is the best scale anyone has ever built. But it's still a scale.
The pace of AI progress is crack to the right ADHD mind. It certainly is for me, but keeping up eventually leaves you hungover, not knowing what day or time it is, and the sting of a tattoo you don't remember getting.
New AI features are coming faster than ever. Financial headlines are starting to whisper "AI bubble." And at a lot of big companies, somewhere between the acceleration and the doubt, the pressure to show progress, to ship, to move faster than you're actually able to move just gets louder. I've never trusted fast. Quick I can work with. Quick is easy if you know what you're doing. Fast just means the speed is the point. Whether my distrust of it is wisdom or stubbornness or fear or just the way my brain is wired — probably all of it — faster tools don't fix it.
Business leaders love fast. Fast generates ideas, designs, code, decisions at a scale no team can match alone. Fast is impressive. But fast is the wrong finish line.
The question that actually matters: how do you know if what AI generated is any good? Who decides? Fast makes it very tempting to get rid of the people best positioned to answer that.
There's a story about an old butcher — Merlin Mann told it once and it was the first thing that came to mind as I started to write. Thirty years behind the counter, the guy doesn't use a scale. Picks up the cut, sets it down, tells you the weight. He's right every time. From thirty years of knowing what right feels like in his hands.
Merlin's point was about dependence on tools for certain jobs. But I kept thinking past it. A scale tells you how much. It can't tell you if a cut is any good. Whether it's fresh. Whether it's what you actually ordered. The butcher can. Thirty years of knowing what right looks like, smells like, feels like.
AI is the best scale anyone has ever built. But it's still a scale. You still need the butcher to make sure your order is good.
The mistake a lot of organizations make is assuming the butcher is the bottleneck. He's slow. The new scale that weighs your order to the atom and wraps it in paper is fast. So get rid of the butcher, move faster, ship more.
Except getting rid of him doesn't remove the bottleneck. It just moves it somewhere more expensive — the part where you're cleaning up after something that the butcher would never have sold.
Most organizations are still on crack. The hangover is coming.
*P.S. — If you think AI feels overwhelming, I'd like to hear about it. napkin@jeremyfuksa.com.
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