September 30, 2026

Reader Response re: The Inevitable AI Pendulum

Fellow list member Andrew Hutton replied to a prediction I made about clients eventually shifting from AI back to actual experts. Here’s what he had to say (shared with permission):

100% agree

It’s already happening

One of my clients is a private equity-backed company in the legal education space

They have been struggling to implement anything of real value from AI

They hired a ‘Head of Artificial Intelligence’ in 2025 and just laid him off a couple months ago

My message from yesterday told a similar “client moving from AI back to an actual expert” story from another reader.

Here’s the thing...

Based on my recent string of AI-related messages, a few readers have asked what happened that turned me against AI.

So to clarify...

I’m not against AI. I use it every day for certain things that I know it’s really good at.

What I AM against is the massive gap between what I see as the current reality of AI and the wild claims that the frontier labs and others have been making about it online.

As I’ve been saying since the early days of ChatGPT, if you can’t immediately validate the quality of the output you get from an LLM, it’s a waste of time because you end up having to research it anyway.

It’s probably faster - and more fun and more educational - to just do the work yourself in the first place.

AI in the hands of an expert?

Sounds good to me.

Non-experts trying to replace experts with AI?

Good luck with that.

Yours,

—J

P.S. As of today, Ditcherville is officially back in Slack. Woohoo! If you’ve been thinking about joining, please read on...

TL;DR: While everyone was in Circle, the Slack room was dormant, so the conversation history has mostly disappeared behind Slack’s 90-day message limit.

As part of the move back, I’m going to do a slightly unusual promotion to help build the channel activity back up.

Keep an eye on your inbox for my next message, because it’ll be somewhat time-sensitive. Stay tuned for more soon!