I recently did a presentation at Compass AI & Tech Summit in Budapest. The title of my presentation was “The 7 pitfalls of AI”. The presentation was about some still unresolved, yet often neglected issues regarding AI. We still need to find good answers for these issues if we want to arrive where we want to be at the end of our AI transition (if there is an end at all). If we fail to find good answers, we risk ending up in a place where we do not want to be, not being able to…

This post is about two observations I repeatedly make when looking around in our community. They are loosely connected by the topic of AI, which makes both observations more visible. The observations are about how we make our lives – IMO unnecessarily – harder.

How often have you heard a phrase like “If you do not become highly proficient in AI/LLMs/Agentic AI now, you will be left behind!” in recent months? Probably more often than you were able (or willing) to count. And it does not stop there. If we do not immediately learn the stuff as advised by the person uttering such phrases, we will lose our jobs and never get a job again. Our existences will be destroyed. And this will be solely our fault because we did not listen and…

To be clear: I do not think we should actually forget technical debt. Also, this is not the nth post discussing if “debt” is an appropriate metaphor. I do not have a strong opinion regarding the metaphor. My point is rather that I realized in a recent discussion that in the end, it is not so much about technical debt but rather about something else, and I wanted to share the thought.

I wrote a lot about the staggering complexity in IT, its detrimental effects, and what we can and should do about it (see, e.g., my “Simplify!” blog series. I wrote about the embedding of the complexity problem in a bigger context in my “Responsible IT” blog series). I also identified several drivers that usually increase accidental complexity, i.e., complexity in the solution which not needed to…