I think the prose in the pre-amble is a bit over-flowery and heavy handed (e.g. LLMs really aren't that expensive, I very much doubt the WSJ claim that Copilot is losing money per user, LLMs aren't always "painfully slow", etc.)
Having said that, the actual recommendations the article offers are pretty reasonable:
- Do as much as you can with code
- For the parts you can't do with code, use specialized AI to solve it
Which is pretty reasonable? But also not particularly novel.
I was hoping the article would go into more depth on how to make an AI product that is actually useful and good. As far as I can tell, there have been a lot of attempts (e.g. the recent humane launch), but not a whole lot of successes yet.
The gist, that the same principles that make a video game where you save a princess fun to learn (e.g. super mario bros) can be applied to building products, seems so obviously true - yet difficult to put into practice.
The most influential part of this presentation is this quote:
When you build applications that let users be smart, they love you for it. The secret to good game design is simple. Set up situations where there is a problem that must be solved and let the user solve it. Give them subtle clue, but don’t take away that ‘aha’ moment.
Scary part: you have to believe the user is smart.