In my last post, I explored the idea that we may be moving from a knowledge-based economy towards something that places greater emphasis on judgement, framing, and leverage.

That shift doesn’t just affect individuals. It has implications for how we structure teams, how we develop capability, and how we think about the long-term sustainability of engineering organisations.

Most of the conversation around AI today is anchored in the near term.

Engineers are asking how it changes their workflow. Product teams are experimenting with copilots. Founders are looking for leverage. There’s a steady undercurrent of anxiety about junior roles disappearing, but it tends to be framed as a tactical problem, something to manage, mitigate, or route around.

I’m less focused on that layer.

Not because it isn’t important, but because it feels like we are still looking at the first-order effects of a much larger shift.

I am not one to shy away from "colourful" language, and I have been known to utilise the odd four letter word to provide emphasis, punctuation, or even comedic effect.

But if I had to ban one four letter word from business vocabulary entirely, I know exactly what it would be:

Just

Conan! What is best in life?
To crush your project deadlines, see them launched before you, and to hear the satisfaction of their users.

When I wrote about my career history late last year in The seven year itch, I called out a few of the projects that I have worked on, but I have been doing some introspection recently as part of updating this site, and realised that I have worked on some incredible projects that I should take more obvious pride in.

Today I saw a LinkedIn post from a COO saying:

Today developers who spend 3 days writing "clean" code that someone else would have shipped in 4 hours with AI are no longer rewarded for their dilligence: they're penalised for their slowness.

What the customer is now measuring:

• How many features did you ship?
• Does it work?
• Does it create value?

The market no longer pays for the craft of writing code; it pays for results.
What if the best thing a senior dev can do in 2026 is teach their team to ship faster, not code cleaner?

Friends, I have opinions...

If you spend 5 minutes scrolling through LinkedIn[^1], you will no doubt be greeted with multiple "think pieces" about how AI is making everything faster, enabling all of the hustle and grind aficionados to hustle and grind extra hard while they maximise shareholder value, or something.

It sounds great — enabling the worlds most entrepreneurial entrepreneurs to entrepreneur at never-before-seen speed, making a thousand decisions before they've finished their first coffee — but I am personally coming to realise that it has a very specific personal downside when it comes to quality, focus, and cognitive load, and it looks like I'm not the only one.

I realised recently that I have now been working at Deltatre for as long as I have worked for any company in my career so far - 6 years and 9 months.

Even if I quit tomorrow my notice period would see me past the 7 year mark, which led me to think about why I have moved on from relatively long-standing employment in the past, and the 7 year figure in particular.

These realisations and questions to myself, along with some recent pondering about age and career direction, led to me wondering what I would want to do next if I decided to move on.

There's still a lot of guff floating about out there about whether the AI bubble is going to burst[^1] , whether AI coding is "good enough yet" (see my previous comments on my previous comments on vibe coding), and whether AI is the silver bullet solution to your problem.

I saw a great post by a former R/GA colleague on LinkedIn today which said that "if you think a specific new technology is the solution to your problem then you probably don't understand the problem enough", and I am minded to agree.

I'm generally a bit painfully averse to the big agency hagiography that goes on in that particular world, but I was actually quite struck that R/GA was voted as one of the "30 most iconic companies in internet history" according to the Webby awards.

A friend sent me an interesting job post the other week, where the hiring manager was looking for people who can dive in and get things done without too much process getting in the way, and it struck me as being a breath of fresh air in a world of process-driven teams and particularly Agile being presented as the de-facto saviour of software development.

It made me wonder what specific problems or constraints that approach was trying to address.