Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and AI tooling
View All TagsIn my most recent posts, I’ve explored how AI is starting to reshape both the structure of engineering teams and the shape of individual capability.
There’s a third dimension that sits across both: Time.
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.
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.
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 turn 50 today.
The reason I mention this is because I have seen a lot of people — mostly on LinkedIn — making dire prognostications that anyone over that age will never work in IT again if they're not currently in work, and that gave me pause for thought.
Given some of my previous comments about vibe coding, I found myself taking a different track and questioning some assumptions (and biases) over the last week and wanted to capture a bit more nuance around the topic.
I have been thinking a lot about AI recently — probably because every other post on LinkedIn is some kind of regurgitated AI think-piece, and every unsolicited email at work seems to revolve around AI strategy — and what it means for our current working practices.
There's an awful lot of buzz at the moment about chatbots, conversational interfaces, and digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa - it seems like there is a steady march of AI into our lives, but is that a good thing?
For marketers and advertisers it may appear to be he beginnings of a brave new world of opportunities to deliver messages to consumers in new and "innovative" ways, but that is a fundamentally naive approach.
In the rush to be part of this brave new world it is this very simple question that is overlooked - "what is the value exchange"?