TL;DR: AI can extend your capabilities and amplify your mistakes. Use it to accelerate your work, not outsource your thinking or judgment.
I’ve seen software engineers build incredible things in very little time. I’ve also seen software engineers ship confident nonsense just as fast.
AI created neither outcome; it made both easier and faster. Calling it a multiplier is imperfect—LLMs can provide knowledge and capabilities you don’t already have—but it captures the central risk: AI amplifies whatever you bring to the table. The less you know about a problem, the harder it is to distinguish leverage from confidently presented error.
If you know what you want, understand the problem, and apply judgment, skill, and experience, you can move at a pace that would have seemed impossible before. But if you switch off your brain and let the machine do the thinking, you can produce huge disasters in no time. The problem isn’t that AI suddenly makes people foolish. It’s that it gives old foolishness a cleaner interface, a faster feedback loop, and a much larger blast radius.
Let’s go back about 26 years, to the beginning of my career.
