The Latest from Aaronontheweb: The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste


The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste

Published on March 27, 2025 in

14 minutes to read

I have a lot of respect for Geoffrey Huntley. So when I read his blog posts about AI over the past couple of months: “Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you’re screwed unless you take action…” and “The future belongs to people who can just do things” among others, I thought to myself - “am I missing something?”

This image of his, in particular, summarizes his take on AI and the impact it’s going to have on the software development industry:

Geoffrey Huntley's "crossing the chasm" for AI developers

He’s essentially singing the same song that people who sell AI courses do: “if you’re not dropping everything to learn AI right now, you’re going to get left behind!” His conclusion to “The future belongs to people who can just do things” ends thusly:

Ya know that old saying ideas are cheap and execution is everything? Well it’s being flipped on its head by AI. Execution is now cheap. All that matters now is brand, distribution, ideas and [retraining] people who get it. The entire concept of time and delivery pace is different now.

Distribution, brand, et al are important - no doubt. The idea that any LLM, even ones with future capabilities, is a catch-all substitute for experience is laughable.

In a world where typing in the right prompt to a chat window is “all you need” for “execution,” this actually makes idea guys even more commodified and worthless than they already are - and they’re already worthless.

Click here to read the full article.

Read more...

Aaronontheweb

I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.

Read more from Aaronontheweb

Stop Failing The `git clone && run` Test Published on October 17, 2025 in 10 minutes to read I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it. Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but improving the “first...

Your HTML Comments Are More Powerful Than You Think: Building Custom Validation Grammars with HtmlAgilityPack Published on October 1, 2025 in 20 minutes to read We were getting ready to redesign and simplify phobos.petabridge.com - our Akka.NET observability platform documentation site. The plan was to remove a bunch of old pages, restructure the information architecture, and redirect everything properly so we wouldn’t break any inbound links from Google, Stack Overflow, or the blog posts...

Bessemer Ventures AI ARR vs. burn benchmarks

There Has Never Been a Better Time to be a Junior Developer - And It Won't Last Forever Published on August 22, 2025 in 11 minutes to read Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vulnerable to automation. They’re dead wrong. I wrote “The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste” a few months back and that’s still...