Process — The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

That aphorism, coined Goodhart’s Law, sprang to mind as my feed filled with hot takes on Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s Twitter boast that “~40% of daily code written at Coinbase is AI-generated” which he coupled with a charge “to get it to >50% by October”.

I encourage all engineers in 2025 to aggressively experiment with AI in their workflows and yet find mandates like this hella cringe.

As Brian holds a CS degree from turn-of-century vintage, I might have expected him to share a suspicion of one of the field’s luminaries, Edsger Djikstra, who remarked in On The Cruelty Of Really Teaching Computer Science that “if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent'”.

In aggregate, AI tooling provides extreme leverage, tempered with enormous variance — some suggestions land flawlessly, others require massaging, many are brazenly bad, and a dangerous few pass smoke tests while including a subtle yet horrifying flaw detectable only by a discerning eye.

Wisdom, meanwhile, lies in distinguishing not just those categories of technical failure, but also the strata of material risk.

Vibe coding is neither inherently good nor bad, providing a powerful prototyping tool in greenfield contexts while fueling reckless behavior in production contexts. Changes to a UI generally don’t bear the same degree of scrutiny as changes that could corrupt terabytes of data in a system of record. Code running in military, intel, medical, transport, and finance contexts demand a degree of conscientiousness that would be overkill most elsewhere.

Context matters.

Results matter, too, and Cargo Cult Science (to borrow from Richard Feynman) has plagued us as long as people have struggled with cause-and-effect — observing a system with desired outputs, people erroneously fixate on incidental details, convincing themselves they need only follow certain rituals to reap the same benefits.

Just ask WWII-era Pacific islanders how effectively coconut headphones attracted airplanes.

Spoiler Alert — they share a group therapy club with BF Skinner’s dancing pigeons, the frustrated participants of British comedy series Taskmaster, and developers following the anti-pattern coined in the classic text Pragmatic Programmer as “Programming By Coincidence”.

The longer I work in engineering, the more I find myself repurposing a Samuel Johnson quote with a single word modification — “process is the last refuge of a scoundrel”.

Patriotism and process alike can be fine things, yet far too often the corrupt, feckless, and incompetent wrap themselves in those shrouds as their final defense, lacking the character and capacity to stand on their own feet, reason from first principles, and generate real value.

Are you a senior executive who has botched hiring, can’t lead from the front, demoralized your workforce, and utterly failed to deliver?

Perhaps the Three Letters parable wants four — blame your predecessor, do a re-org, adopt a trendy process, write four letters.

If Scrum feels too yesterday’s news then maybe start rewarding people for how much AI slop they ram into GitHub.

Since Charlie Munger has departed, I’ll say it for him — show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.