Seeing things through in the age of AI

AI is fantastic at prototyping. A quick draft of an essay, a mockup of a website, a demo of a video game, concept art or trailer for a movie, or the core argument of a proof – each now takes one prompt instead of a week. 1000x speedup. AI is useful for helping finish longer projects, but clearly not as good at it. Polishing up a paper draft that would have taken a month still takes two weeks. Finishing a video game that would have taken three years still takes two. Cleaning up every bug, human-checking a proof, covering every use case, handling every small nit and matter of taste, building production-ready infrastructure, all of that is work that, in my experience, only sees a 2x speedup with AI, at best. AI is a 1000x speedup for drafting and only 2x speedup at finishing. See the problem?We are seeing an absolute flood of slop in every AI-touched discipline, and nowhere near the promised gains in the stuff that matters. Humans are being completely hijacked by the high of being able…