The AI Great Leap Forward

A sharp critique of top-down AI mandates sweeping through companies in 2026, drawing a sustained parallel to Mao's Great Leap Forward. The author argues that organizations are producing 'backyard AI' — visually polished but functionally hollow tools built without evaluation pipelines, baselines, or domain expertise. Four patterns are identified: teams shipping demoware with no validation (backyard furnaces), inflated productivity metrics reported upward with no methodology (grain reporting), elimination of critical institutional knowledge holders like middle managers and QA (killing sparrows), and 'Hundred Flowers'-style mandates to distill expertise into agent skills that employees deliberately sabotage to preserve job security. The piece concludes that the famine — unmaintainable tech debt, missing institutional knowledge, and failed AI replacements — hasn't arrived yet but is coming, citing Klarna's quiet reversal on replacing Salesforce with internal AI as an early signal.