"AI first" and the Bus Factor of 0

Summary

All the opinions expressed in this article and on this website are entirely my own and do not represent my employer in any way. Ever heard about the “Bus factor”? It is a concept that measures the risk of losing all knowledge about a particular thing – a software development project for example – by estimating how many team members could get crushed by a bus before nobody knows how to work on the project anymore. As an example, if 3 people on your team know how to restore a backup of your database, the Bus Factor for that particular function in 3. From one to zero Since the dawn of humanity, even long before buses existed, the Bus Factor has always had a “worst case” value of 1. If the sole keeper of a piece of knowledge came to pass, the knowledge was lost, unless it had been transferred previously. And humanity has worked hard to keep itself far from this Bus Factor of 1. Brown-bag sessions, documentation, video tutorials, knowledge handovers, demos and showcases, without forgetting schools, and many more mechanisms in which an uncountable number of man-hours has been sunk. But on the 30th of November 2022, all of this changed, and suddenly a large part of humanity became perfectly fine with a Bus Factor not just of 1, but of zero. AI first, humans nowhere That date corresponds to the release of ChatGPT to the public, and the start of the mass-market adoption of GenAI. It’s also the birth of what would become 3 years later the concept of “AI first”. One might think that “AI first” would leave humans second, but, unsurprisingly, delegating the creation process to machines has instead left us nowhere to be found when it comes to knowledge keeping. Focusing a bit on programming, it seems like a growing part of the industry is now happy to let LLMs generate functions, entire features, or even complete projects (security holes included). They have moved on from understanding their code-base and preserving this knowledge to actively trying to avoid having any piece of k...