Oh good, another breathless LinkedIn post about how AI just 10x’d someone’s development velocity. Fantastic. You know what else moves fast? A semi truck in the mountains of Tennessee with brakes that have failed. Speed is great until you realize your only hope for survival is a runaway truck ramp.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit at their AI productivity [ahem… self-congratulatory gathering]: AI doesn’t matter if you don’t have a clue what to build.
I’ve watched teams use ChatGPT to crank out five different implementations of features nobody wanted in the time it used to take them to build one feature nobody wanted. Congratulations, you’ve quintupled your output of garbage. Your CEO must be so proud. Maybe you can have ChatGPT restyle your resume to look like VS Code or the AWS Console, but it’s not going to change the experience you have listed on it.
Going fast in the wrong direction gets you to the wrong place faster. But it’s still the wrong place. You’re just confidently incorrect at scale now.
Agile Saves You From Your Own Stupidity (Sometimes)
You know why Agile actually works when it works? Not because of the stand-ups or the poker planning or whatever cult ritual your scrum master insists on. It works because it forces you to pause every couple weeks and ask “wait, is this actually the right thing?”
Short iterations exist to limit the blast radius of your terrible decisions. When you inevitably realize you’ve been building the wrong thing, you’ve only wasted two weeks instead of six months. It’s damage control, not strategy.
But sure, let’s use AI to speedrun through our sprints so we can discover we built the wrong thing in three days instead of ten. Efficiency!
Product Strategy: The Thing You Skipped
Here’s a wild idea: what if you actually figured out what to build before you built it?
I know, I know. Product strategy and user research are boring. They don’t give you that dopamine hit of shipping code. They require talking to actual users, which is terrifying because they might tell you your brilliant idea is stupid.
But you know what product strategy and research actually do? They narrow down your options. They give you constraints. They help you make informed bets instead of random guesses.
Because here’s the math that AI evangelists keep missing: Improving your odds of success by building the right thing will always beat building the wrong things 10 times faster.
Building the wrong feature in three days instead of two weeks doesn’t make you 5x more productive. It makes you 5x more wrong. You’ve just accelerated your march into irrelevance.
AI as a Validation Tool, Not a Strategy Replacement
Now, I’m not saying AI is useless. It’s actually pretty good at helping you validate ideas faster. Rapid prototyping, quick mockups, testing assumptions—yeah, that stuff is genuinely helpful.
But AI can’t tell you what to validate. It can’t tell you which customer problem is worth solving. It can’t tell you if your market actually exists or if you’re just building another solution in search of a problem.
That still requires thinking. Remember thinking? That thing we used to do before we decided to outsource our brains to autocomplete?
The Uncomfortable Truth
The dirty secret of software development has always been that most of our productivity problems aren’t technical. (See the reprint of the “No Silver Bullet” essay from 1986 in a collection of timeless project managements essays, The Mythical Man-Month) They’re strategic. We build the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time. (Ok, yes, they’re also communication and coordination problems… fortunately, we have Slack for that <insert eye roll emoji here>)
AI speeds up the building part. Great. But if you’re speeding toward the wrong destination, you’re just failing faster.
Maybe instead of celebrating how quickly you can ship features, you should figure out which features are worth shipping in the first place. Crazy thought, I know.
But hey, what do I know? I’m just a grumpy coworker who thinks you should know where you’re going before you hit the gas.
Now get back to work. And for the love of god, talk to your users and other humans instead of spending all day chatting with a chatbot that declares you a deity when you correct it.