Before we begin
I am grateful for the opportunities AI has opened up for Qxf2. Over the last three years, we have adapted gradually, been selective about the tools we adopt, and tried to be responsible about using AI. We have become more effective with AI. In fact, we do more with fewer people. My own daily work benefits from AI. And yet ….… the AI taketh away
AI adoption seems to have messed with my world in three personal and meaningful ways. These are extremely personal and might not resonate with most people. But I know several of my friends and colleagues who have values and belief systems similar to mine. And hearing the weirdness we all feel verbalized might help.1. The joy of intellectual productivity has been diluted
Siegbert Tarrasch, a great chess player of the late 1800s, observed that chess is a form of “intellectual productiveness” and therein lay it’s charm. As someone who learnt to play chess before I could speak English, I agree. That’s the part of chess that appeals most to me. In fact, almost all my hobbies and interests have revolved around feeling “intellectually productive”. I am the guy that likes to consume a lot of information, enjoys dealing with complexity, works out details without feeling bored. In the this AI-assisted world we live in, none of those aforementioned skills are valuable anymore. LLMs do a good enough job in most cases. Unless someone needs the extra quality and higher precision that a human like me offers, there is not much business sense in not using AI. Perhaps I need to figure out how to derive the feeling of intellectual productiveness in a different way while continuing to use AI.2. I no longer concentrate for extended periods of time
I have not had a chance to concentrate for long periods of time at work in a while now. These days, there are more waiting periods as I wait for AI to finish a task. Perhaps I am not yet a power user of AI. But I feel most of colleagues at Qxf2 and my clients seem to be the same. We delegate work to the AI, perhaps even multiple agents, and then wait. Based on what we get back, we delegate the next step or iterate on the current step. There is this pattern of concentrating for a few minutes, then waiting, then concentrating again. For me, that’s weird, really different and simply blows my mind.3. A dip in quality of people I work with
I have enough material to write an entire post about this point. Perhaps this one is a rant and not just an observation. I decided to work exclusively with startups through my 20+ year career. The main motivation behind that was that I got to work with enterprising colleagues, avoid busy work and stay away from fake expertise. But LLMs have made that impossible even at small companies. I have had endure so many irresponsible uses of AI in the last 18 months. It’s almost like some people are not even reviewing the output of the AI, not exercising their own discretion, not enforcing their judgement on the output of AI.And it’s not just that we are facing a rise in AI slop at work. We are having to contend regularly with false expertise. For example, we might produce a thoughtfully crafted test strategy based on our extensive QA experience. And someone with absolutely no clue about QA could reply with generic, outdated and often wrong opinions generated by some LLM that has looked at our strategy without really knowing the context of the problem we are solving. This sort of ‘pretend expertise’ used to be hard to pull off in smaller companies. But now, we see a rise in such behaviour. A little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing.
Hopefully these effects are just temporary
Like how chess got richer and deeper when engines got better, I trust our craft will get richer and deeper as AI gets more powerful. Hopefully, these effects are simply transitionary until the industry figures out how to hire better, hold engineers accountable and mitigate the negative effects of over-relying on AI.Footnote: If you are wondering about the title, it derives from a keyboard shortcut used in Chessbase. Chessbase is the software that all chess professionals use as part of their preparation. Pressing spacebar is the way a human can ask the engine for the best move in a position. Folks serious about chess often lament that too many players don’t think for themselves and instead press spacebar.
I want to find out what conditions produce remarkable software. A few years ago, I chose to work as the first professional tester at a startup. I successfully won credibility for testers and established a world-class team. I have lead the testing for early versions of multiple products. Today, I run Qxf2 Services. Qxf2 provides software testing services for startups. If you are interested in what Qxf2 offers or simply want to talk about testing, you can contact me at: [email protected]. I like testing, math, chess and dogs.
