Anil Dash:

The Facebooks and Twitters of the world killed the Web 2.0 dream of open data and interoperable technologies for lots of people, and users lost out. All kinds of stupid situations became routine, like not being able to see an embedded Instagram photo on a Twitter timeline

It’s ironic that an instagram photo in a twitter timeline is banned, but slurping up all intellectual property ever created and repurposing for your own profit is fine.

But I digress.

This challenge of just supporting the standard thing is harder than it seems. A while back, when we launched a semantic caching product for popular AI platforms, one of the hardest things to convince our super genius developers to do was to just... use the regular ChatGPT API. "But we can make it better!" they'll say. Developers always say that. But better is worse. Anything that's different is worse. Stop being smarter and more clever, and stop cleaning up that horrible spec that is riddled with inconsistencies, and just ship the same shit as everybody else. You know what was a garbage spec that was missing all kinds of stuff? HTML! And yet here we are, on the wonderful world wide web. The whole internet sits atop a bunch of terrible specs

The beautiful, ugly child that is the web!

It was never meant to be proprietary. It was never meant to be controlled by a handful of dudes at a tiny number of giant companies. It was always meant to be programmable through janky specs that everybody hurriedly adopted just for the sheer joy of something fun to hack on. That was true long before the web had any version numbers at all.

Anil Dash:

being AI-first shows that a company is participating in the AI trend in the "right" way, by imposing it on workers, rather than trusting workers to judge what tools are useful for them to do their jobs.

Welcome to freedom through compulsion.

I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn't that interesting?

I’ve worked at companies where I couldn’t even get Figma for our team because of corporate standards for compliance, security, etc. But along comes AI with its questionable foundations, and that Trojan horse is gladly let in at the gates.

It's telling that the creators of so many of the AI tools don't even have enough confidence in their offerings to simply let users choose to adopt them, and are instead forcing them into users' faces in every possible corner of their apps and websites.

Anil’s is a great commentary on these AI-first company memos going around.

I don't think the audience for these memos is really the people who work at these companies. I think the audience is the other CEOs and investors and VCs in the industry, just as it was for the other fads of the last few years. And I expect that AI will indeed be part of how we evaluate performance in the future, but mostly in that the way CEOs communicate to their teams about technologies like AI will be part of how we all evaluate their performance as leaders.