Notes on AI "cathedrals"

Here is Zac Hill on software "cathedrals" (via this very flattering Matt Glassman post). Summary: this think tank Fellow is an absolute crusher with generative AI. It's a good read. Some thoughts: I suspect that the shape of work matters here. Emmet, it seems, makes a lot of research dashboards and reports. A knack for making skills (or any Skill-like AI components) is particularly useful in this kind of project, because there is a kind of broad domain expertise that automates particularly well this way. Knowing where to get the data, how to clean it, what to look out for, what kinds of analyses to do, how to display it... it sounds dismissive to call anything a "bag of tricks," but there's a kind of practical expertise that involves a lot of (i) medium-tricky mini-expertises and (ii) knowing when to apply them. I mean this the opposite of dismissively. (I'm optimistic that, for example, we'll see great AI-assisted work in philology and classics for analogous reasons--but that's…