HypeGuard: Evidence-Based AI Adoption Framework for Engineering Teams

Something worth noting at least in terms of management is that it's not necessarily media illiteracy causing them to get sucked into the hype. It's fear. When business types see these being adopted by competitors and subsequently advertising AI features a lot, and when customers are all talking about it, it's really easy to fall into a thinking pattern where you also have to adopt or your business will perish.

Studies and evidence can always be cherry-picked and pretty much made up since most reports about the latest models aren't independently reviewed. The problem isn't that the higher ups aren't waiting for evidence, it's that they're high up in the system BECAUSE they don't care. It's a systemic problem. CEOs and directors and high level managers are supposed to maximize attracting capital, and hype always attracts capital. If they don't jump on the latest bandwagon and make their employees follow suit, they'll be replaced with those who do.

Seems to me that managers are just doing the AI dance really fast in the hopes that each time the music stops they're going to find a chair. They don't have the luxury of technical competency to get work and feel more exposed if they aren't seen to be ushering in the revolution. I see it in their eyes, if you say things like: "hey it seems like we always had the option to just YOLO deploy prototype code but chose not to for obvious reasons, or at least reasons built up over 30 years of gradual and hard fought improvements in the software delivery process. Why does AI get a free pass? You used to go bananas if there was a prod issue." And they will really just not engage with the question. They will go back to talking about how you can put agents in your agents now, to add agent guard rails to your agents so that they agent more agently. Which is why yes we should think about agent agents but really it's an agentic workflow problem. But then this is no different to anything else. It's like trying to ask if Agile is really all it's cracked up to be. Or maybe less so now, because people are allowed to say Kanban or other things now, but you didn't really get good engagement with the question. It was mostly just: we need to put Agile into more of the organisation.