I’ve adopted AI. Full stop. I’ve gone through a journey since my last post. At first, it was enough to adopt agentic engineering practices and use AI-assisted development tools to write helper scripts, review PRs, and accelerate my engineering. Then I looked at the things that interrupt or steal time unexpectedly, and tried to automate them. I’ve reached the point where anytime I’m manually interacting with a system – a form, a spreadsheet – I’m wondering why it wasn’t automated in the first place.
What I’m learning is that efficiency in software development using AI tools highlights organizational inefficiencies as engineering bottlenecks are removed. Why are so many company processes manual or Excel-based? Why do I need to read and comprehend an email about the access required for my team to adopt a new tool, instead of the tool and the access being set up for us? Why is there so much process friction that I’m submitting helpdesk tickets to correct configuration errors, request access, or set up new pipelines multiple times per week?
Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
There’s a debate around essays like “Code has always been the easy part“. Some developers claim that the cost of entry was always high and the need to stay technically current was demanding. I never found that to be the case, professionally. I always found that changing leadership, lack of business requirements, frequent pivots, and organizational inefficiency were the biggest bottlenecks to product delivery. Code was always easy; systems were hard.
So, as I read about engineering groups shrinking and two-pizza teams standardizing around one-pizza teams, I wonder whether the organizations will shrink, too. As a middle manager, I worry about the future. But I also realize that system problems, especially at very large companies, were always my biggest bottleneck as an engineer. If AI helps us collapse bureaucracy so that the people filling out Excel spreadsheets, Google Forms, or IT helpdesk tickets can automate away the need for those systems, we’ll see a massive productivity boost across industries.
Coding was always the easy part. Onboarding is hard. QA is hard. Shipping products is hard. We’ve made the easy part easier. It’s time to focus on the harder parts.
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