Many Are Building Cathedrals on Quicksand
The foundations of AI development shift every quarter. These are the architectural choices that outlast the churn.
Medieval cathedrals were designed to outlast their builders. The architects who laid the first stones at Notre-Dame knew they'd never see it finished. They planned in centuries.
We're doing the opposite. We're building software on foundations that shift every quarter, with vendor relationships that treat genuinely competitive commercial providers as neutral infrastructure, and with code that hard-codes behaviors that will be deprecated before the next sprint cycle.
GPT-4 was state of the art in early 2023. By late 2024, it was middle of the pack [1]. Entire startups built on specific model behaviors woke up to find their core assumption was gone. Not wrong. Not deprecated with a migration guide. Just: gone, or quietly changed, or superseded by something so different the old prompts didn't work anymore.
