Member-only story
The Cost of AI’s Speed Addiction: Why Generative AI Risks Collapsing Software Engineering
— and how we can fix it before it’s too late
Nonmembers, click here
The Illusion of “Instant Productivity”
I remember the first time I paired with GitHub Copilot.
It felt like magic. A function I would’ve spent 15 minutes crafting appeared in seconds. Then it wrote my tests. Then it scaffolded my API routes.
It was intoxicating.
And like most intoxicating things, I didn’t notice the hangover creeping in.
Fast forward a few months — and the “magic” came with a bill: systems that looked fine on the surface but crumbled under real-world pressure, workloads bloated with low-value features, and an unsettling reliance on opaque AI decision-making.
We’ve been told AI is the productivity miracle of our generation. But underneath the speed, there’s a cost — ecological, operational, and ethical — that could quietly undermine the very industry it’s meant to save.
Part 1 — The Hidden Collapse
Over the last year, I’ve dug deep into the realities of AI-assisted software development. Here’s what the data —…
