Ways of Working at the Speed of Thought
Ways of Working at the Speed of Thought
Product talked to a BA. The BA talked to a scrum master. The scrum master scheduled a refinement. Engineers showed up, debated the shape of the feature, poked at the data model, estimated it, and dropped it into the backlog. Eventually — maybe next sprint, maybe next quarter, maybe never — somebody wrote the code.
That was the shape of enterprise software for two decades. We built elaborate coordination machinery around a single hard fact: writing the code was the slow, expensive, error-prone step. Everything else existed to protect that scarce resource.
That fact is no longer true. And most enterprises are still running the coordination machinery for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
The idea-to-code distance has collapsed. Enterprises that keep the old orchestration machinery wrapped around AI-assisted engineers are paying relay-race taxes on a sprint. Invest in platform architecture (what's good for engineers is a force multiplier for agents), analyze your own prompt patterns before you build skills, dismantle ceremonies designed to coordinate humans, and give the restless builders a direct line to the business.