A and R Block

Today’s musing centers around this response to Steve Yegge’s Opus 4.8 critique. I’ve pulled back to Sonnet for most of what I do these days; partly that’s a cost choice and partly because I don’t have a meaningful use case for an advanced thinking model.

Steve’s critique and Dare Obasanjo’s summation fit within one of the limits I’ve been seeing. I’ve identified it as the inability of a model to know when to be intentionally wrong. I understand that, with additional training data or reasoning layers, a model could be tuned to a category of voice, but it can’t reproduce my voice; even if trained on my writings, it couldn’t reproduce how I will want to express myself in a year. Yesterday my voice may have been incandescent irreverence; tomorrow it might be spurned arrogance. I’m not even a professional writer, yet I’ve found it too easy to confound Opus (AIQ Scale).

There’s an argument that this doesn’t matter in the world of careers. A company doesn’t hire a candidate because of their voice; they hire the candidate to complete tasks. Plug & Play — snap that intelligence tool into that employee’s place. I think most people instinctively understand the folly of that view. Companies live and die by culture. The personalities of those at every level play an intrinsic role in company momentum. HBR is littered with articles about the impact of culture and how to curate it.

Does this really impact the world of digital product development? Anyone who’s had to deliver against a McManagement Consultancy deck versus the Product Brief of a slightly too-enthusiastic Product Manager will tell you which one they prefer. Voice matters because it creates moments of connection. Those are the moments that push us, spurring the momentum to do more than check boxes.

I don’t think intelligence tools are going away, but, like every tech hype cycle of the last few decades, the companies seeking total sector domination haven’t found a way to right-size what’s being built to what we actually need to make better things.