Automation Is Not Innovation

Automation is powerful. But automation is not innovation. Confusing the two is how companies stagnate while believing they are moving forward.

I have an IQ in the range of 130 to 135, tested while having ADHD and without medication. I am not stating this to flex. It is not exceptionally high, and my point is not that I am smarter than CEOs. If anything, I assume most CEOs are smarter than me. What confuses me is not their intelligence, but the narrative they are promoting.

Business is largely about marketing, positioning, and selling stories. Technology works differently.

Historically, technological innovation has grown at a superlinear rate. The web is not new, yet it never stagnated after its creation. On the frontend, we moved from early frameworks to Angular, then React, and now systems like Next.js. The same pattern exists on the backend, in infrastructure, and in developer tooling. Progress did not slow. It compounded.

In artificial intelligence, the current state of the art models are Transformers. At their core, they predict the next token based on previous tokens. The pipeline is simple in principle: data is collected, a model is trained, and the system predicts patterns extremely well.

This is impressive. It is also automation.

Current architectures are nowhere near artificial general intelligence. There is no shared definition of AGI, and scaling model size is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive and increasingly inefficient strategy that avoids the harder problem of discovering genuinely new ideas. Bigger models are not a substitute for new paradigms.

If you are a software engineer whose job consists primarily of rewriting the same CRUD logic repeatedly, then yes, that work is highly automatable. But I have worked with many exceptional developers who build real systems, design robust architectures, and solve problems that are not reducible to pattern matching or Leetcode exercises.

Big tech companies have massive funding and have delivered extraordinary innovation over the years. That is why the current narrative is so puzzling. The claim that developers are no longer needed, or that AI can replace them wholesale, does not align with how technology has ever progressed.

AI combined with skilled software engineers should expand the space of what is possible. It should accelerate experimentation, reduce friction, and open new doors for innovation. Instead, companies are focused on shrinking. Growth has been replaced by cost cutting.

Ironically, software engineers should be the last group to be replaced. They are the ones who build, maintain, and integrate automation in the first place. Removing them early is not efficiency. It is a strategic error.

Everyone is excited about tools like Claude Code. If these systems are truly that capable, then why acquire Bun for one billion dollars instead of simply hiring senior engineers to build it internally?

Automation can amplify innovation, but it cannot replace it. Confusing the two is how companies stall while believing they are moving forward.