AI coding agents have changed how software gets shipped. The old development bottlenecks vanish overnight because an agent can now write a feature or refactor a service in seconds. But that rapid execution exposes a whole new class of problems. The new code runs successfully in the developer’s environment. The automated pipeline runs tests, linting, and build checks. Everything passed. The code gets approved in review. That new feature does exactly what was asked. ...
We’re in a medium-sized tech services company. It is a quarterly review meeting. The management team is reviewing the delivery milestones as committed. When they get to the release calendar, the CEO asks why it’s the same. Indeed, a few months earlier, upon a perfect slide deck from the VP of Engineering and the product leaders, the CEO committed to another investment budget for AI. That deck was about AI adoption. The shared benefit highlighted was everyone using it, with an implicit delivery performance improvement as a consequence. There was no more precision, but everyone saw the need to go all in on AI. ...