Same here—I tolerated the linguistic tics, I found enough meat to keep going, but it’s the conclusions that confuse me. And that feels like the intellectually dangerous part with this sort of LLM writing. For example:

> Convergent evolution is real. Every major GDS independently arrived at the same underlying platform. That is not coincidence — it is the market discovering the optimal solution to a specific problem.

I struggle to understand the claim that GDSes “arrived independently” at interoperability standards through “convergent evolution” and market discovery. Isn’t it something closer to a Schelling point, or a network effect, or using the word “platform” to mean “protocol” or “standard”?

Isn’t it like saying “HTML arose from web browsers’ independent, convergent evolution”? Like—I guess, in that if you diverge from the common standard then you lose the cooperative benefits—see IE6. And I guess, in that in the beginning there was Mosaic, and Mosaic spoke HTML, that all who came after might speak HTML too. But that’s not convergent evolution, that’s helping yourself to the cooperative benefits of a standard.

“The market” was highly regulated when the first GDSes were born in the US. Fares, carriers, and schedules were fixed between given points; interlining was a business advantage; the relationships between airlines and with travel agents were well-defined; and so on [0]. IATA extended standards across the world; you didn’t have to do it the IATA way, but you’d be leaving business on the table.

If anything, it seems like direct-booking PSSes (he mentioned Navitaire [1]) demonstrate the opposite of the LLM’s claim. As the market opened up and the business space changed, new and divergent models found purchase, and new software paradigms emerged to describe them. It took a decade or two (and upheaval in the global industry) before the direct-booking LCC world saw value in integrating with legacy GDSes, right?

…the LLM also seems bizarrely impressed that identifiers identify things:

> One PNR, two airlines, the same underlying platform.

> Two tickets, two currencies of denomination, one underlying NUC arithmetic tying them together.

> One 9-character string, sitting in a PNR field, threading across four organisations' financial systems.

[0] https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/airline-deregul...

[1] https://www.phocuswire.com/Jilted-by-JetBlue-for-Sabre-Navit...

The Problem That Built an Industry