Deterministic When Possible. Probabilistic When Necessary. Human When Cheaper.

One inescapable conclusion I’ve had to draw observing our industry over the last couple of years is that the AI thing isn’t about productivity. If it was, teams would be looking for ways to improve outcomes. But that’s not what I’ve been seeing. I’ve seen dev teams setting out with the specific goal to use AI coding agents as much as possible, with the impact a secondary (or even a thirdary) concern. I’ve watched developers prompting Claude Code to rename classes or methods when there’s a shortcut in their editor that will do it with a fraction of the keystrokes, using a tiny, tiny fraction of the compute and the energy, and do it more reliably. I’ve watched them task Copilot with finding unused code when background compilation has already identified it. I’ve watched them explain the code they want to Codex in more words than the code itself, and the model still gets it wrong. Arguably these people have lost the plot. And there are those other teams; the ones who use the best tool for…