I want to talk about something specific I’m seeing in the field.Companies are deploying AI-built infrastructure at production scale. Full production environments architected and implemented with AI guidance by teams who will tell you honestly that their background isn’t IT.

And it works. Right now. Today, it works.

Here’s the problem. When they bring in a professional to evaluate what they’ve built, or to help when something needs to change, the engagement starts in a place that has no precedent in our industry.

Traditional spaghetti code was built by humans who understood the decisions they made, even if the decisions were bad. You could interrogate the developer. You could read the commit history. You could trace the reasoning. When you inherit AI-built infrastructure, nobody in the room can give you a reliable accounting of why it’s wired the way it’s wired. Not the team that deployed it. Not the AI that generated it. And not the professional they’ve brought in to assess it.

In a traditional environment, if something this tangled landed on your desk, you’d evaluate whether it’s faster to fix it or rebuild it clean. But that option is gone here. These aren’t staging environments. They went straight to production. Staff are operating in them daily. You can’t reset a live system that the business is running on.

So you’re left with surgery. And surgery means tracing every linkage, every permission, every integration point, and reconstructing the reasoning behind decisions that may not have had reasoning… they had AI confidence. That’s a fundamentally different kind of technical debt. It’s not bad decisions documented badly. It’s undocumented decisions that might not be decisions at all.

And the hardest part is the position it puts the professional in. If you raise these concerns, you’re labeled the pessimist. But in reality, you’re the only one doing risk management. Nobody wants to hear that the infrastructure they’re proud of (that genuinely is solving real problems for them today) is a potential liability they can’t see yet.

I’m not against AI integration. It’s a genuine force multiplier when it’s done with understanding. But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool and using AI as a substitute for knowing what you’ve built. And right now, I’m watching companies cross that line at speed, with nobody in the room who can tell them where it is.

If this sounds like your company… or you’re not sure yet, comment below.

Not because I wanted to.
Because creditors don’t accept Venmo requests to the universe.

Here’s what nobody on this platform will tell you about unemployment:

It has a liquidation schedule.

Week 1-4 : You sell the easy stuff.
The monitor you weren’t using. The old iPad.
You tell yourself you’re “decluttering.” 🧹
It feels *productive*.

Month 2-3 : You sell the good stuff.
The collectibles. The tools.
The things you were saving “for the right project.”
You tell yourself you’re “being strategic.”

Month 4-6 : You sell who you are.
The equipment that makes you *you*.
The things that took 20 years to accumulate
and 20 minutes to list on Facebook Marketplace
for a third of what they’re worth.

Month 7+ : “Hmm… that’s not bolted down…”
Nobody talks about this.

They talk about “upskilling.” 🚀
They talk about “pivoting.” 🔄
They talk about “networking.” 🤝

Nobody talks about the spreadsheet
where you rank your possessions
by how much they’ll bring
versus how much it’ll hurt.

Nobody posts about pricing their identity
at 30 cents on the dollar
because the buyer knows you can’t wait.

So the next time someone posts
“I’m thrilled to announce” 🎉

Just remember:

Somebody else just posted a Marketplace listing
that started with “Moving, must sell”
when they’re not moving anywhere…
They’re just trying to hold onto that last shred.

NOTE: inspired by the flood of contacts I’ve received from my last post as well as personal anecdotes. … image inspired by the story of Vivian Maier.