3314112bb9
Add two new sources with summaries, new concepts (developer-as-agent-manager, review-is-the-new-bottleneck), new entities (SWEPR, Nikolai Sheiko), and a query on the Stanford source; update related concept pages, overview, index, and log.
42 lines
6.4 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
6.4 KiB
Markdown
# Enterprise AI Reality
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#concept
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## Summary
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The indie/practitioner world and the regulated-enterprise world diverge sharply. Sebastian's key business insight: [[harness|"bring your own harness"]] **cannot survive compliance**, so a scalable, company-managed standard harness is an underserved market — "the interesting market."
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## Current Understanding
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- **Locked-down reality:** at Sebastian's biggest clients, engineers can't use their own laptops — only a centrally-managed VM with **zero ability to install their own tools**. Compliance and liability make ad-hoc, per-developer setups impossible. Reference points: a Roche SAP transformation ran ~1,200 engineers for years; banks first banned AI outright and now cautiously adopt it "because it's just so good."
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- **The business opportunity:** *scalable, manageable, company-standard harnesses for larger engineering teams.* The gap between what individuals can do (custom [[harness]]) and what enterprises can allow **is** the product.
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- **Governance vs leverage tension:** individuals get maximum leverage from personal harnesses ([[eugene]]); enterprises must standardize and control ([[sebastian]]). Unresolved — and monetizable.
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- **Adjacent constraints:** the [[seniority-and-the-junior-squeeze|"read what you approve"]] security concern is amplified at scale; safety-critical/regulated code is the clear exception to [[code-as-throwaway|"most code isn't high-value"]].
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- **A second divide: the token budget** (added 2026-07-28; **scope corrected 2026-07-28** — see below). [[thorsten-ball]] names two variables separating winners from losers — knowing how to use agents, and **having the token budget to do it**. It cuts both ways for this page: an enterprise can buy budget an individual cannot, while a locked-down enterprise may withhold it from the people who would use it best. Whoever controls the budget controls how far [[explosion-of-internal-software|internal software]] spreads. Thorsten names the variable and says nothing about who pays.
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- **Scoping correction.** This was first written here as "the divide is also a *spending* gap," which overstates it. Thorsten's pricing regime is **metered**: [[amp]] sells usage, and his working pattern is parallel remote sandboxes and parked orbs ([[async-by-default]]) — a fleet cost, not a seat cost. Under a **flat consumer subscription** the corpus's own evidence points the other way: [[eugene]] runs 7 project-agents in parallel on a $200 plan, [[allie-miller]] runs ~100 agents and 36 workflows, and neither reports hitting a cost ceiling — while [[2026-07-14-sebastian-eugene-interview]] frames levelling as "a 20-year veteran and a fresh grad **on the same subscription**." For individual and small-team use the budget is one subscription; the token-budget variable bites at fleet scale and under metered pricing, which is where Thorsten sits and where enterprises will land.
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- **The market claim, seconded — and sharpened into a quote** (added 2026-07-30). [[nikolai-sheiko]], from multi-company adoption work: *"Companies no longer need custom AI development. Come in, install Claude Code or Codex, configure everything, attach connectors, think about security — and it works better than any custom build."* This is Sebastian's company-managed-harness market stated as a service playbook. Two adoption anti-patterns attached: **the external configurator** who leaves a "magic artifact" nobody on the team owns (what a company should buy is a *teacher/curator*; the team must configure its own tools — the [[solve-first-then-skillify|evolution]] has to happen in their hands), and **metered pricing shaping behaviour** — a team on Cursor's per-token billing economizes instead of experimenting (~30% dearer than subscriptions at the same level), which is the metered-vs-subscription split from the scoping correction above observed as an organizational failure mode. His pricing prediction — tokens get dearer near-term, cheaper later; "experiment at full throttle while subscriptions are cheap" — matches [[eugene]]'s price-rise prediction already flagged in the token-budget question.
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- **The frontier's advice does not transfer.** [[shedding-weight]] — kill the backlog, kill CI that repeats the agent's tests, kill local dev in favour of remote sandboxes ([[async-by-default]]) — describes a startup that owns its own process. In a regulated shop the pipeline, the audit trail and the ticket history frequently *are* the deliverable to a regulator, and code sitting in a vendor's remote sandbox is precisely what Sebastian's clients forbid. The gap between what the frontier recommends and what compliance permits is the same gap this page calls the market.
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## Evidence
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- Managed VMs / zero self-install, Roche ~1,200 engineers, banks banned→adopting, "company-managed resource," "the interesting market" — [[2026-07-14-sebastian-eugene-interview]].
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- Token budget as a winner/loser variable; the frontier playbook (kill backlog/CI/local dev, remote sandboxes) that compliance cannot follow — [[2026-07-28-agentic-engineering-10x-developer]].
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- "No custom AI development needed" quote; external-configurator anti-pattern vs teacher/curator; Cursor per-token billing → team economizes; tokens-dearer-then-cheaper prediction — [[2026-07-30-rakes-in-ai-sdlc-adoption]].
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## Related Pages
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- Concepts: [[harness]], [[seniority-and-the-junior-squeeze]], [[code-as-throwaway]], [[shedding-weight]], [[async-by-default]], [[explosion-of-internal-software]], [[context-as-scarce-resource]]
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- Entities: [[sebastian]], [[virtido]], [[eugene]], [[thorsten-ball]], [[nikolai-sheiko]]
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- Tools: [[claude-code]], [[amp]]
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## Contradictions / Uncertainty
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- How AI transforms *huge* (~1,200-engineer, multi-year) programs is explicitly unknown even to Sebastian.
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- Whether [[virtido|Virtido]] itself is building the company-managed harness, or just naming the market, is unstated.
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- [[amp]]'s orb model (code, conversation and diff living in a vendor's remote sandbox) is a direct test case for this page and the source never addresses it. Whether the frontier's unit of work is adoptable at all under compliance is open. Status: tentative.
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## Next Questions
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- What is the minimal compliant feature set for a centrally-managed enterprise harness?
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- Who controls the token budget in a large organisation, and is it allocated by role, by team, or by request? The corpus has no evidence either way, and it decides who actually gets to use the tools.
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