Yesterday, I kept seeing this story repeated about Stripe and the new AI model from Anthropic. The claim is the AI was able to do in one day what it would have taken months for the existing teams to do.
While that certainly does sound impressive, the conclusion we’re expected to come to is that this is only possible because of the new model, and honestly that fails the credibility test for me.
Consider this story when the right handpicked people completed in 3 hours, a piece of work estimated at 10-12 weeks.
Doesn’t that sound almost identical? Yet, it didn’t rely on magical tooling, it just needed us to undo some organizational dysfunction and to put the right people in the room to collaborate on the problem.
That story was from roughly ten years ago, well before any of the AI tools appeared on the scene.
I’m fairly confident that the new model is an impressive step up and I’m looking forward to trying it. Having said all of that, let’s apply some critical thinking to the headlines we keep repeating.