A long-time friend regularly uses a team of AIs to help him refactor and update programs; he sets up prompts to clearly and carefully identify their roles and responsibilities so they don't get to hallucinate all over the projects. He succeeds because he's an experienced programmer and project lead who's familiar with techniques for getting good results with projects, and he can use AI to do in a week what would have taken him months without it. But he understands well how to do these things plus he has considerable skills and talent.
Getting quality results with agentic AI requires considerable planning and test design (unit & project level). Not just anyone can do these things, my friend has skills and insight. Amazon recently laid him off, so he's on his own, free-lancing and working at a startup.
These huge tech companies may have just shot themselves in their collective feet by letting so much creativity, skill, and talent loose in what's already a tough job-finding environment. There's a lot less to gain by switching employers or career paths for financial safety, so they'll be doing the things they already know how to do well, in the wild. If humans survive the next 2 years, we could see a computing renaissance comparable to the '90s. The companies pimping their foundation models complete with cumbersome data centers are going to find themselves competing against an ocean of skilled independent users running their own AIs locally in smaller shops and a dwindling subscription base overall. Will they make AI invent their new ideas for them? Cos that's really not AI's strong suite.
These companies are making exactly the wrong move by shrinking their workforce instead of enabling higher productivity from that workforce and actually using AIs to do amazing things in the service of humanity. Instead, they'll face an army of tiny competitors putting forth swarms of incredibly useful applications and devices, slurping up patents, pulling investment capital -- not quite what they bargained for, eh?
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