AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-06-04
Simon Willison amplifies Charity Majors' framing that AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics in engineering teams both face legitimate existential threats, and that bridging their gap requires deliberate organizational feedback-loop design.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-adoptionorganizational-designengineering-cultureagentic-ai
Claims
- Teams leaning hard into AI are seeing real, discontinuous capability leaps that competitors who wait out may not survive.
- Shipping code faster than engineers can read it depletes institutional trust and knowledge built over years.
- There is no natural feedback loop connecting AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics within organizations.
- Bridging the gap between the two groups is fundamentally an organizational design problem, not just a technical one.
Key quotes
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.
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.
There is no natural feedback loop connecting enthusiasts with skeptics.