Great reply. I agree with a lot what you said, but I want to make two points:

First, based on a human breakdown and pointing of stories as if AI weren’t being used, using the methodology we have used for years, we are seeing real delivery velocity increases. Now measurement is tricky; story points are arbitrary for a team. Some of those gains are in stuff like “wrote AI tool” or “created AI documentation” which means we’re being more productive at things we never used to need to do. Still, when you factor all of that in as best you can, we are seeing a measurable 20% increase. (The analysis does point at 30%, but I see holes in how those numbers are built.)

Second:

we are in the dark about what pieces of information would be needed to shift the probability towards the thing we actually want

I don’t think we are completely in the dark. I think we are working on figuring out how to improve the context. The problem I see with the current approach is everyone is doing it independently, their methodology is poor because we can’t afford the tokens for exhaustive tests that are invalidated with the next model, and the results are entirely subjective (and frequently written by AI to sound like absolute success).

So I come up with something that is amazing for my teams, and you try it, but because you’re in a different domain my technique isn’t quite right, and because our lives have provided us with different context, you don’t implement it quite the way I would have, and so your results differ and is it the domain, or the implementation, or did I just get some lucky rolls?

One of the things I do in my spare time because I’ve been fascinated by AI for years, is I use AI to write stories. I come up with a premise, maybe do some world building, write an opening, and just let AI go and see what happens, steering it when necessary.

Now there are two ways to steer: you can “reroll” or you can just edit the text directly. And what I’ve seen over years of doing this is the more human text you inject in, the better the results are. Even if you reroll to steer in the direction you want, the AI will eventually start producing utter gibberish. The quality starts to go down and then falls off a cliff.

Human input slows that or even stops it altogether. Human input is an essential element in getting good results out of AI. Because bullshit built upon bullshit is multiplicative. An AI that is 99% good falls to 50% good very quickly.

My point is that humans need to interact with the AI to provide that context you correctly point out the AI can never have, and it has to be frequent because you get to a point of saturation where a human is overwhelmed by the volume of text.