Saying ‘No’ is an Under-Valued Skill – Good Ideas Need Friction More Than Ever

A lot has been spoken about how modern team members who are just joining the workforce are lacking certain critical skills.

I’m not even talking about the obvious issues with young-uns not knowing how to navigate a file system, or even read and write code without robotic help.

There’s something more hidden and insidious causing otherwise talented and experienced developers to harm their own projects, too.

The last thing any project, team, or organisation needs is to pay for an additional and influential sycophant.

AI gaslighting or lack of taste?

OK, so it won’t tell you that your ideas suck, how bad can that be? Bad. Really bad. Anthropic conducted a study that found tools were helping produce more code, but “nearly 50% of the output needs correction”. Combine that slop with code that shouldn’t have even been worked on, and you can see the issue.

In the past, resources and constraints would make even the most straightforward projects cling close to what is realistically achievable, for good and for bad. Now, if someone has a “billion-dollar” idea, such as “It’s like Tinder but for naked mole rats”, instead of taking it to a developer, who would often laugh directly into their faces, the idea-haver can just start churning it out and burn through tokens.

The “Homer” has everything you asked for and nothing you need

Back when I headed up development teams working on large projects, a key part of my job was deciding for the team what to work on and in what order. If you have a short-tempered CEO, it is tempting to agree to all of their demands and drive your team harder and harder, but eventually that cascades into trouble that is worse than pushing back.

Even if you are developing for your own use, if you want to move ahead rather than keep playing with bots, you need to know what problem you are solving, where you are headed, when you want to be done, and what success looks like. Even more so if you are part of a distributed team or organisation.