Comment by mkovach

This isn't new. It's been the same problem for decades, not what gets built, but what gets accepted.

Weak ownership, unclear direction, and "sure, I guess" reviews were survivable when output was slow. When changes came in one at a time, you could get away with not really deciding.

AI doesn't introduce a new failure mode. It puts pressure on the old one. The trickle becomes a firehose, and suddenly every gap is visible. Nobody quite owns the decision. Standards exist somewhere between tribal memory, wishful thinking, and coffee. And the question of whether something actually belongs gets deferred just long enough to merge it, but forces the answer without input.

The teams doing well with agentic workflows aren't typically using magic models. They've just done the uncomfortable work of deciding what they're building, how decisions are made, and who has the authority to say no.

AI is fine, it just removed another excuse for not having our act together. While we certainly can side-eye AI because of it, we own the problems. Well, not me. The other guy who quit before I started.