First, let me say that I undoubtedly see the value of AI as a tool. For me, it’s effectively a better “Google” or Wikipedia. A better starting place. It can be a mentor that guides and answers “dumb” questions.

But yesterday, I encountered frustration using AI. Sure, for things you don’t care to understand — where you “just want it to work” — let it rip through dollars and burn the world (I’m partially kidding as unfortunate as it is).

It’s frustrating seeing AI just repeatedly try different things in a loop. I mean maybe it helped me understand what wouldn’t work. But honestly after like three loops, I get to the point where I realize that my time is going to be better spent trying to understand the first principles of the problem so that I can understand why AI is struggling so much trying to produce a working solution. And either doing it myself or asking AI to do it some other way.

It’s like those days earlier in my career when I could feel I was asking a question that made no sense — when Google returned no usable results. Am I sitting here burning money because I’ve asked it the wrong question?

I don’t think humans go away any time soon if we care at all about money.