It’s goal setting time at my day job again. Senior management at my company is all a-tizzy about the AI hype going ’round these days, so this year they asked everyone in the organization to submit an “AI Goal”. I thought I’d have some fun with it and have an AI help me write it. Here’s what we came up with:
Everyone is worried about losing their job to an AI. So the first goal obviously is to not get replaced by an AI. Failing this, a reasonable backup goal would be to get laid off with an adequate severance so I can retire in comfort and style. Of course it’s not just software developers who should worry, it’s everyone who makes their living using words. As a bonus goal, maybe it would be fun to see whoever thought up that everyone should have an AI goal get replaced by an AI.
Second, vibe coding is all the rage these day, but why stop at vibe coding? Let’s start doing vibe configs, vibe deploys, vibe QA, vibe PRDs, vibe project management and vibe roadmapping. Maybe even vibe goal setting!!!
Third, and on a more serious note, I work in AI every day, using AI tools to build AI products is central to my job in the coming year. What could go wrong? Well, even as AI (in the present day usage of the term to mean conversational chatbots driven by LLMs) presents opportunities, it has its drawbacks too. It is massively overhyped right now, widely misunderstood in terms of its capabilities, and replete with fundamental problems including unavoidable inaccurate and false information, massive theft of other people’s intellectual properties, and vast wastefulness of electricity and other resources, to name a few. Better to approach these things with a sense of calm and rationality. Also try to be less snarky and sarcastic.
AI represents a potential existential threat not just to [our company] but to everybody who values thoughtfulness and truth. I’m starting to suspect that [our vice president’s] secret genius plan is to get over the hype bubble and “poisoning the well” problem as quickly as possible by leaning into AI, and then other side [our company] will emerge as source of true, accurate and reliable information, which will be valued at a premium as never before.
My manager said he liked it. At least we weren’t asked to come up with blockchain goals.