Despite also paying for Claude, I live in Kimi 90% of the time. There’s something about its “tone” for lack of a better word that feels different. So it’s cool to read this article about the company and culture behind it.
I’ve been thinking about how AI will change the way companies are organized. It’s hard to believe that today’s corporation is the ultimate organizational form, there’s just too much stupidity on display.
How will companies compete in the future when they’re all just an AI wrapper?
This is really two articles in one. First a (great) history of the spreadsheet.
Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.
What makes companies special? They're state machines. Reality is a collection of systems of records, events and processes. Companies are special due to their people and their judgement and timing, and the data they have access to and what permissions they have to do things. And marketing? What else?
Forgetting what the password is because you always just use the fingerprint reader…that’s why for elderly family members I nowadays set it up not to use the fingerprint any more. I thought they’d be annoyed but funnily enough they experience it as a sense of agency, that they are the one unlocking the computer and are in charge of it.
This article comes down to “as a developer not all my experience is relevant anymore, but some still is, and you should stay up to date”. That’s never not been the case.
You're not wrong, it has always been true, but actually internalizing it as you grow older is hard, and rare.
It is very difficult to let go of some hard-earned experience and acknowledge that it's no longer much of a factor.
There are lots of examples, but the one that springs to mind is download file size. 30 years ago that was critical. Today, meh, 10 megs or 20 megs doesn't matter.
No clearly (before all us old folks have a heart attack), yes size still matters to a point. But in truth that point is waaaay higher than we'd like to admit.
And of course this is not limited to tech. It applies to every industry. My dad bemoans the fact that he can't tinker on his car the way he did in my youth.
The real secret is not in knowing the summary of the post, the really hard part is in figuring out what still applies and what is obsolete.
reply