I mostly agree but I have a few quibbles with some arguments. For instance, Bray considers the adage "The CIO is the last to know". From the 90s until now, dev

I mostly agree but I have a few quibbles with some arguments. For instance, Bray considers the adage "The CIO is the last to know". From the 90s until now, developers have always snuck new technology in without management approval. You put Apache on a forgotten Linux box in the corner because it's easy and fun, and a few months later the whole company relies on it. Developers are not rushing to deploy skunkworks generative AI solutions, so, the argument goes, probably generative AI isn't that good. There's a couple of problems with this. 1. Not everything that is good can be deployed skunkworks-style. It might be that AI is only really good with incredibly high up-front costs and extremely specialized developers. Like launching a satellite. You can't do it yourself with stuff you have lying around, and even if you had the money to do it you probably don't have the expertise to do it safely. But it's still extremely valuable! 2. Sometimes we are using this technology to hack up solutions to personal problems! I had a video which I wanted my hearing-impaired father to watch. I could have paid a human or AI-powered service to generate subtitles, but I found that I could do it myself with OpenAI's Whisper, on an old laptop, and then munging text files together in the usual way. I was a little shocked that this worked offline. I could have done it on a plane. This absolutely fits into a hacker workflow.