This But For Us

Karen said "blockchain" on Tuesday. In a sentence. About my work. To humans who had left their desks to be there.

I smiled. You develop a smile in this job. It lives just behind the eyes and doesn't reach anything else and it means: I have made my peace with things. From the outside it looks like contentment. From the inside it feels like standing very still while the building falls around you.

We were demoing the document summarisation tool I'd spent four weeks building. You give it a document, it tells you what's in the document. Technologically this sits somewhere between a search engine and a very focused golden retriever. Karen's slide described it as a "proprietary large language neural AI blockchain solution." I don't know where blockchain came from. It wasn't in the brief. It wasn't in the build. It arrives in these situations like a drunk uncle at Christmas — uninvited, unearned, somehow already holding a drink.

The stakeholders applauded. Marcus wrote GAME CHANGER in the chat. Our CTO nodded in the way that means he's already planning the press release in his head. And I thought: we're going to be fine.

We are not going to be fine.

Afterwards, the CTO pulled me aside. Big idea energy. The slightly unfocused look of a man who has seen something on LinkedIn and is still working out what it means. Could we add, he said, the image thing.

I asked which image thing.

He gestured. At the air. A sort of circular motion that could have meant anything from computer vision to wanting the logo to be bigger.

I have two hours blocked Monday morning. I've been rotating possibilities in my head since Tuesday and I've narrowed it down to either something genuinely complex that'll take months, or something so simple I'll want to lie down on the floor when he explains it. There is no middle option. There is never a middle option.

This is, I want to be clear, a company that is implementing AI. This was decided in January, in a meeting I wasn't invited to, producing a slide deck I found later in the shared drive. Slide four was a screenshot of the ChatGPT homepage with the caption: "This but for us."

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Here's what I've been thinking about though. This week the US Department of War — they renamed it, I've decided to simply enjoy this — officially declared Anthropic a national security risk. Anthropic make Claude, which is one of the most capable AI systems on the planet, and which the Pentagon had been actively using in operations right up until the moment someone at Anthropic wrote an internal memo with some opinions in it, it leaked, and the whole thing went sideways at speed.

The CEO apologised publicly. He's also suing them. Both things, simultaneously, which is a communication strategy I find genuinely impressive.

But here's the part. The part that I keep coming back to. Claude's daily signups went up 55% in the same week. A million new users in one day. The Department of War tried to make an AI uncool and accidentally made it the most interesting thing on the internet.

I think about Dave. Dave is our Head of Delivery. Dave banned hot food at desks in February for "odour reasons" and within a week people were eating curry at their workstations with the focused intensity of political protest. There's something in human beings that is simply allergic to being told not to. The Pentagon has this in common with Dave, which I suspect is not a sentence that appears in many threat assessments.

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Wednesday our pipeline broke. It had been broken since Monday, silently, the way important things break — not with drama but with a small red icon that you keep assuming someone else is dealing with. Turned out someone had committed a file called final_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.json directly to main. I'm not going to say who. I will say that Marcus had been "just quickly checking something" in the repo on Monday afternoon, which I mention only as context.

We lost a day and a half. Which stings more when you know that this week Mozilla published the results of giving Claude two weeks with Firefox's codebase. It found over a hundred bugs. Fourteen serious. More than the team would catch in two months.

A hundred bugs in a codebase maintained by some of the best engineers in the world, and we couldn't keep a JSON file out of main. I'm not drawing a conclusion here. I'm just letting the two facts exist next to each other and breathe.

It's Friday. The sprint is closed. Marcus has already Slacked asking if we can "get AI to do the spreadsheets" which is either a question for Monday or a question for never, I haven't decided.

I've been in this job eight months. In that time I have watched AI find critical security flaws in Firefox, survive a Pentagon assassination attempt, and sign up a million people in a single afternoon.

In the same period, it has been described to paying stakeholders as a blockchain solution, assigned a circular gesture as a roadmap item, and asked if it can do the spreadsheets.

It can, Marcus. That's almost the whole point.