[whstl]

I recently had a very interesting interaction in a few small startups I freelanced for recently.

In a 1-year company, the only tech person that's been there for more than 3-4 months (the CTO), only really understands a tiny fraction of the codebase and infrastructure, and can't review code anymore. Application size has blown up tremendously despite being quite simple. Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends, and sales is CONSTANTLY complaining about small bugs that take weeks to solve.

The funny thing is that this is an AI company, but I see the CTO constantly asking developers "how much of that code is AI?". Paranoia has set in for him.

[automatic6131]

>Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends

Oh, look, you've normalized deviance. All of these things are screaming red flags, the house is burning down around you.

[forgetfulness]

This sounds just like a typical startup or small consultancy drunk on Ruby gems and codegen (scaffolding) back in the Rails heyday.

People who don’t yet have the maturity for the responsibility of their roles, thinking that merely adopting a new technology will make up for not taking care of the processes and the people.

[whstl]

Bingo. The founders have no maturity, responsibility and believe they "made it" because they got somewhere AI. Now they're pushing back against AI because they can't understand the app anymore.