AI is actually quite awful for prototyping, because it makes it far too easy to add random crap to your "prototype" without any specific intention. This quickly transforms the prototyping process from something that's high-level and geared towards building the mental model of the real system into something akin to copy-editing a random piece of software without any coherent mental model involved. Moreover, prompting allows to to glaze over some essential complexity of the task without getting any notions of the scope of the effort of actually doing it. In other words, people end up failing to make necessary decisions and simultaneously get bogged down with unnecessary ones.

In short, fast feedback loops are only useful if there is actual feedback involved.

FWIW though the idea about a "speed" product and a "stability" product isn't new. We used to call it "prototyping". I don't know when/how that disappeared from the collective consciousness. "have a space where we can build things fast with horrible practices" isn't some AI era innovation, it's what smart companies have done for decades.

I saw this yesterday

https://trinkle23897.github.io/learning-beyond-gradients/

They are very remotely related yet somehow very close.

Remember that the first half of this statement, the part listed here, is great. I love playing with new tools.

The only bad part is the implicit bit after the dots: "we should use this in our product." You don't want cool things anywhere near your product, unless the cool thing is that they remove complexity.

The message that hits for me is that of AI being a destabilizer while simultaneously being an accelerator. The Speed/Scale suggestion won't address this. A codebase no one understands, growing at machine speed won't go away just because you drew a box around it. The fix is likely more mundane stuff like process and role shifts, smaller PRs, tests, tooling, ownership principles.

The thing breaks, the salesperson says "can you check this out?" then disappears and we're back to where we started.

I don't even find this very new: many companies I've been at have tried to spin-off a "fast" team to sell stuff.