Steve Yegge's hot takes: pace AI to human speed, don't buy software factories
Steve_Yegge · x · 2026-11-15
After talks at two conferences, Steve Yegge distills what surprised audiences:
- Slow down: almost nobody is actually going fast with AI; engineering moves at engineering speed, and pushing harder causes downtime. Even his 12-person game operation saw agents overwhelm players, his accountant, merge queues, and machines — sometimes launching broken OSS without permission.
- Don't buy a software factory: they require extraordinary upkeep; he has burned down five because rewriting beat fixing. Factories become deeply bespoke to your domain — 'a company in a box' — so build, don't buy.
- Prediction: next year brings human/agent and agent/agent office drama; everyone gets a personal chief-of-staff agent, and people will become dependent enough to bring their entourages to work.
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