AI & Alignment

Raw coding speed isn’t the bottleneck. Alignment is the bottleneck. That seems to be a zeitgeist-y theme lately. If you’re using AI to code, maybe you’re feeling it. You can code more and faster. And clearly a boatload of other developers are doing that too. But software doesn’t seem to be exploding in quantity or quality broadly. Maybe it’s a little? But if AI is 10✕ing our coding, we’re certainly not seeing software get 10✕ better. Which is maybe why Andrew Murphy is saying: If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems. Your developers are producing PRs faster than ever. Great. Wonderful. Gold star. Someone get the confetti cannon. Now those PRs hit the review queue, and your reviewers haven’t tripled. Nobody tripled the reviewers. Nobody even thought about the reviewers, because the reviewers weren’t in the vendor’s slide deck. Or maybe you don’t even get to the “too many PRs” problem because nobody even knows quite what to build. Because you…