There’s a saying in the motorcycling world: “Dress for the slide, not for the ride.”
A lot of what passes for AI deployment right now is dressing for the ride.
Ride west from Washington DC on a sunny Sunday in spring and you will see this saying flagrantly ignored. Mostly by young men in shorts and flip-flops doing 120 on a Gixxer. The squid. A common enough sight out here.
Outcomes for squids can be, let’s say, mixed.
I ride, and I take the slide part pretty seriously. So, as we get into the peak of the riding season (and I prepare for my annual bike trip), I keep thinking of the slide every time I watch or read about someone tokenmaxxing their way into production.
Dressing for the ride means chasing the number of tokens your developers burn, reaching for trendy tools that give security folks palpitations, and pushing brittle agent workflows into production on the strength of an AI-generated PowerPoint slide (ahem).
Dressing for the slide is the unsexy part: like me putting on my airbag vest and looking like a middle-aged Indian Michelin man. Guardrails to prevent getting run over by adversarial prompting. Observability and cost management so a runaway agent loop doesn’t blow up your infrastructure budget.
None of this stuff demos well, and it feels like a great time sink. It is also the difference between a near miss and an involuntary organ donation.
What most grizzled older riders understand is that dressing for the slide is what lets you ride fast and long. Getting passed by a septuagenarian wearing a high-viz vest on a well-maintained GS older than your average AI developer is a humbling experience.
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Photo – me looking like a middle-aged Michelin man after riding up to the highest motorable pass in the world two years ago. My trusty Shoei helmet, gloves and dorky adventure bike not in shot :-).
