Category: AI-Driven Development
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The AI Productivity Paradox Has Data Now
Months ago, I wrote about the measurement problem: engineering metrics rewarding the wrong behavior after AI adoption. That post was a diagnosis based on pattern recognition across organizations, velocity climbing while delivery stayed flat, dashboards turning green while products shipped late. The data arrived. Between late 2025 and mid-2026, five independent research programs published findings…
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Who Owns AI Governance When Everyone Thinks Someone Else Does?
A few months ago, during a governance assessment at a mid-size financial services company, I asked a simple question: “Who owns AI governance here?” The CISO said the CTO owned it because AI is a technology decision. The CTO said the data team owned it because AI is fundamentally a data problem. The head of…
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Mob Construction: What Changes When AI Generates Code from a Real Specification
Two weeks after the Mob Elaboration session I described in my previous post, the same financial services team sat down for their first Mob Construction session. They had a validated specification: twelve user stories with acceptance criteria, a domain model with verification tiers, non-functional requirements with measurable thresholds, and a risk register that included the regulatory…
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Mob Elaboration: What Happens When AI Runs the Requirements Room
The first time I facilitated a Mob Elaboration session, the Product Owner read the Intent aloud: a new customer onboarding flow for a financial services platform. Within four minutes, the AI had generated twelve user stories, acceptance criteria for each, a proposed domain model, and a decomposition into three independent units of work. A senior…
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The Community Is Building AI-DLC Without Knowing It
A few weeks ago, a developer on Reddit posted about a workflow they had built for Claude Code (r/ClaudeAI, March 2026). They had split their AI-assisted development into three distinct agents: an Architect that defined the system design and constraints, a Builder that generated the code, and a Reviewer that evaluated the output against the…
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Security as a Development Constraint, Not a Review Gate
A compromised npm maintainer account pushed malicious versions of Axios, one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries, to the registry. The attack, which hit last month, bypassed GitHub Actions entirely. The attacker published directly via the npm CLI with stolen credentials. A hidden dependency deployed a remote access trojan. For three hours, every npm install that…
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Infrastructure as Code Is Not DevOps
Last month, March 2026, Iranian drone strikes hit AWS data centers in the Gulf. The me-south-1 region went offline, and developers scrambled. On Reddit, the stories split into two camps. One developer lost everything. They had Terraform templates. They had infrastructure defined in code. What they did not have was drift detection, cross-region reproducibility, tested…
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The Measurement Problem: When Your Metrics Reward the Wrong Behavior
Last year, I sat in a quarterly business review where an engineering director presented what he called “the best quarter in the team’s history.” Velocity was up 42%. Pull requests per developer had nearly doubled. Sprint burndowns were textbook smooth. The slides were polished, the trend lines all pointed up, and the room was nodding…
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Why AI Fails on Your Existing Codebase: The Case for Code Elevation
A few weeks ago, a team I was advising tried something that sounded perfectly reasonable. They had an existing e-commerce platform, about five years old, built as a modular monolith with a few extracted microservices. The business wanted a recommendation engine integrated into the product catalog. The team had been using AI coding assistants for…
