The Virtue of Laziness in an AI Enabled World

This is a great essay by Bryan Cantrill about the decline of laziness as a virtue in programming.

Of course, the implicit wink here is that it takes a lot of work to be lazy: when programmers are engaged in the seeming laziness of hammock-driven development, we are in fact turning the problem over and over in our heads. We undertake the hard intellectual work of developing these abstractions in part because we are optimizing the hypothetical time of our future selves, even if at the expense of our current one. When we get this calculus right, it is glorious, as the abstraction serves not just ourselves, but all who come after us. That is, our laziness serves to make software easier to write, and systems easier to compose — to allow more people to write more of it.

We ignore the value of laziness at our peril. I’m constantly asked if I fear that AI is going to take my job or destroy what our firm has built. The answer is quite confidently, no. I see too many people blindly trusting the stochastic parrots and shutting down their deep thinking capabilities while glazing over a wall of text. This lack of thinking is creating massive dislocations and opportunities for businesses if you can remain clear-headed through the noise.