Last year, during an engagement with an insurance company, I worked with the product leadership team to understand why their 8-month AI initiative had stalled. They’d assembled a dedicated AI working group, ran three PI planning cycles where AI use cases were formally assigned to Release Trains, and produced a 21-slide deck explaining their AI strategy.

They had not shipped a single AI-powered feature.

The working group was waiting on the Q3 plan to be ratified before beginning experimentation. The Release Trains were waiting on the working group’s recommendations. The 21-slide deck was in review with the PMO.

This wasn’t negligence or laziness. This also wasn’t a technology problem. This was SAFe working exactly as designed. — Read More

Something strange is happening in software engineering right now.

Companies adopted AI to speed up code generation, and on the surface, it worked. AI can write syntax faster than any human ever could. It can generate boilerplate, suggest implementations, create tests, and even imitate design patterns in seconds.

That sounds like the beginning of the end for software engineering.

But that is not what is actually happening.

The real story is more interesting. — Read More