When “Good Enough” Doesn’t Cut It

In software engineering, it's not a given that quality and speed are at odds. I've written about that before, and yesterday's post is in that spirit as well.

But when you use AI, you do indeed introduce that tradeoff, at least in some cases. That AI summary was generated at blazing speed, but it's probably not as to-the-point as one from a true expert. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. A 90%-there summary of the latest weekly planning meeting generated in 1% of the time sounds like a good use of AI.

In other times, no amount of speedup is worth even a single percentage point of quality loss. A legal document that's 99% airtight instead of 100% is useless, no matter how fast it was generated. And don't discount reputational risk: Companies whose marketing material has all the hallmarks of lazy AI prompting find out soon enough that there's a price to be paid.

Know where your use case lies, and own the tradeoff.