Ten-layer diagrams of the AI stack are accurate and slightly misleading, because they draw every layer the same size. Building a compliance agent that now handles most of our cases end to end, the first four took a couple of weeks. The rest took the year. Embeddings, a vector store, retrieval, a model. That’s the demo, and it demos well enough that people start asking about a rollout date. Then the actual work starts. ...
A model wrote most of a service I shipped this month. Reading it took twenty minutes. Deciding I was willing to put my name on it took the rest of the day. That ratio is the whole post. Writing code was never the expensive part. Owning it is. I’ve been in this trade long enough to remember when typing was a real bottleneck. It stopped being one around the time autocomplete got good, and nobody noticed, because we kept measuring engineers by output. Lines, tickets, velocity. Proxies for the cheapest activity in the building. ...