The Messy 9 and Coding with AI - A Panel Discussion

Special thanks to John Allspaw, Sheeri Cabral, Martin Smith, and David Woods for joining us!Ben Affleck’s been making the promo rounds, but the specific convo we reference is recapped here: https://www.moviemaker.com/ben-affleck-ai-explains/The Messy 9 are:congestioncascadeconflictlagsaturationfrictiontemposurprisetanglesDave’s been doing a set of videos on Resilience Engineering, some of which have some crossover with the Messy 9 - you can find the first one here:https://resiliencefoundations.github.io/video-1-introduction-pt-1-it's-all-about-viability.htmlPrevious TiF episode on the messy 9:https://www.thisisfinepod.com/the-pod/complex-systems-and-the-messy-nine-wspecial-guests-dave-woods-and-john-allspawRichard Cook on Above the Line/Below the Line: Written - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3379510A good excerpt from a talk from John Allspaw on Above the Line/Below the Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxj-FLEi10&list=PLb1aZTnPf3-OMChMkrr6WsokRI6LOnuem Colette mentioned the competence knowledge model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competenceThere’s a good argument based on the conversation here that AI makes it harder for Consciously Incompetent people to graduate to Conscious Competence. And, in Martin’s case, it makes Unconsciously Competent folks need to backtrack into Conscience Competence to “teach” it how to do things they don’t always think about.We can reset the clock to 0 episodes since we’ve mentioned the Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdfThere is a good blog on Jamie Zawinski’s saying on regular expressions here: https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247Alex Gorbachev and The Battle Against Any Guess seems to have become a paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251255185_Battle_Against_Any_GuessDave talks about Robust Yet Fragile as part of Resilience Engineering here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFotUdLL2zsLorin Hochstein’s blog post that Dave is referencing is https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/19/amdahl-gustafson-coding-agents-and-you/Fred writes a good one on the Law of Stretched Systems: ​​https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.htmlThe 1985 paper Dave keeps mentioning could be any number of things he released that year, but I have a hunch it’s this one: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/511 or this one: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-50329-0_11Dave references a lot of things around the economic sustainability around AI, and Ed Zitron has been writing quite a bit about that for the last year and change. See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/Among others.