Crufty AI
There’s a word MIT hackers coined in the 1950s: cruft — useless, tangled, accumulated junk that makes a system incomprehensible and impossible to build on. Sound familiar? In 2026, we have a new variant: crufty AI. Chatbots bolted onto data silos. LLMs fed dirty, unstructured, undocumented inputs. Automation layered on top of processes nobody fully understands anymore. Pilots that never graduate. Dashboards nobody uses. Vendors paid. ROI: zero. This isn’t an AI problem. It’s a cruft problem. ...