And our habits need to catch up
This isn’t about individual productivity tools.
It’s a structural shift in where the leverage is — and most teams haven’t updated their processes to match.
A first draft — component, migration, test suite — costs minutes, not days.
The bottleneck has moved from writing to reviewing, deciding, and integrating.
When execution is fast, the scarce resource isn’t effort.
It’s clarity.
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| DRY code, premature abstraction | Duplication is fine — AI regenerates |
| Boilerplate and scaffolding | Near-zero cost, not worth a process |
| Seniority = how to implement | Seniority = what to build and what not to |
| Elaborate task decomposition | Fast feedback loops beat upfront planning |
What are we still doing the old way — not because it’s better, but because we haven’t stopped to ask?
When code is fast, unclear requirements become visible immediately.
The team blocks on decisions, not execution.
Decision speed is the new lead time.
Every handoff loses context that AI can’t reconstruct.
Fewer handoffs — or richer async context — aren’t just nice to have anymore.
They’re the critical path.
Output volume goes up.
Review capacity doesn’t.
Code isn’t safer just because AI wrote it. Judgement at review is now a genuine constraint.
AI excels at local solutions.
It doesn’t hold your architecture in mind.
That role gets more important, not less, as generation scales up.
“The most valuable thing a senior engineer does is knowing what not to build.”
Taste and judgment — knowing good from good-enough, maintaining user perspective at speed, knowing when to ship vs keep iterating.
This is the one thing AI doesn’t have. It compounds with experience. Build it deliberately.
Four phases, 90 minutes.
The goal isn’t to produce a perfect plan. It’s to surface what’s actually slowing us down — and commit to three specific bets.
Before theory, map reality.
Where has AI changed your daily work most? Where hasn’t it? What are you still doing the old way?
Format: popcorn sharing → cluster on whiteboard
Go through our ceremonies, processes, and work patterns.
Mark each: still valuable / diminishing returns / should stop
Format: 10 min solo sticky notes → 15 min group discussion
In small groups, map a recent feature from idea to shipped.
Mark every waiting point, handoff, and slow decision.
Format: groups of 3-4, each map a different project → compare patterns
Don’t solve everything.
Pick three specific changes to try in the next 6 weeks.
One thing to stop.
One thing to change how we do it.
One new practice to build — with a clear owner.
It never really was.
The constraint is clarity, judgment, and the courage to change what isn’t working.
Scan to follow along
The Economics of Software Are Changing
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