Don't Fire Your Employees, Please

When I took Ancient Greek in graduate school, I became enamored with the “Men ..de (μέν…δέ)” construction — enamored to the point of pomposity. Nonetheless, it’s a useful construction.

In classical Greek, “Men … de” is used to present opposing or contrasting views. On the one hand, Icarus had a nice takeoff. On the other hand, he had an unfortunate landing.

AI is like that. “Men … de”.

On the One Hand

There is no doubt that small teams can now build software that, until very recently, required hundreds of people. On the one hand, we can conclude:

“We can do the same thing with fewer people.”

But that’s one side of the story.

On the Other Hand

This talk with Linus Torvalds highlights a couple of overlooked aspects of software development. First, the hardest part is not the first 90%, it’s the last 10%. The last 10% is maintenance and upkeep. And that last 10% often takes up 90% of the effort. This is a lesson most “business types” never seem to get.

Second, AI coding tools are great tools, but they also have an innate propensity to turn out slop. I say innate because most of the training data on the internet is slop. And as we rely more and more on AI coding tools, slop is producing more slop. A generous portion of Double Slop.

Therefore

Please, don’t fire your employees. The host of the Torvalds interview puts it like this:

“We can do the same thing with fewer people, or do more things with the people that we have.”

Your employees know things and can do things that no AI can match.

Therefore, Don’t be like Icarus.