Stop Asking Einstein to Run Your Datacenters

If a manager hired me to design their UI, I’d question their judgment. Sure, I could probably learn, given enough time and resources. But why would you do that when there are highly qualified designers out there who’d do it better, faster, and cheaper? I want my skills aligned with my employer’s needs. That’s not a limitation, that’s aligned incentives.

This is obvious when we talk about people. Nobody hires a theoretical physicist to manage their server fleet. You wouldn’t ask Einstein to run your datacenters — not because he’s not smart enough, but because you’d be asking him to throw away his decades of experience in physics and re-train as an SRE. That’s like hiring a Formula 1 driver to drive your Honda Civic to the grocery store. They’ll get you there, sure, but was that really the best use of everyone’s time and money?

And yet.

We judge models on whether they can reason about quantum mechanics, compose poetry, and debate constitutional law, all in one conversation. Then companies pay engineers to make LLMs parse JSON and fix typos, and complain about the costs. We take the most capable, most amazing systems we’ve ever built and point them at tasks that a linter, a script, or a type checker could handle.

Your engineers were so preoccupied with whether they could use AI, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Is there a simpler, cheaper, more reliable tool for the job?

Save the reasoning engine for the work that actually requires reasoning.

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.” — Terry Pratchett

Related reading:

• Oops I Did It Again, I Forgot –dry-run — on building systems that ask “are you sure?” before your agent deletes production
• Don’t Hate the Agent, Hate the Process — on why the agent isn’t the problem