Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.

This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find.

The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.

The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.

She goes on to say that “the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.” Interesting read.

Tags: artificial intelligence · Charity Majors · programming

Plaque installed at actor’s former home in Pimlico, central London, where he lived from the age of five to 12

Laurence Olivier has joined David Garrick, Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward in having an English Heritage blue plaque outside his former London home.

Ian McKellen unveiled the plaque at 22 Lupus Street in Pimlico, where Olivier lived from the age of five to 12 and discovered a talent for acting under the watchful eye of his father, a curate at St Saviour’s church across the road.

The actor and director who have long been snubbed will finally take home Oscars at November’s Governors awards

Glenn Close and Ridley Scott are among the names set to receive honorary Oscars at this year’s Governors awards.

The two have long been snubbed at the Oscars, with Close receiving eight nominations and Scott receiving four. The pair will be awarded this November alongside animator Floyd Norman and producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler.