Don't Resign Yourself to Default

What is your company doing about code reviews these days? What about QA? Is your pipeline fully AI-managed, or do you have human gatekeepers? What about user stories, who writes them? Do you find your acceptance criteria inflated? How do you deal with a colleague who keeps sending you slop to review? How do you deal with deadlines, estimates and incidents these days? The CEO keeps showing you vibe coded, half-done products and tells you this should be easy and you can definitely do it. Your Sales peer just told some of your prospects about hallucinated features like they were real.

I bet at least some of the above sounds familiar to you.

We are playing catch-up with these changes driven by AI; we're being reactive. Most of us have an overall opinion, but we don’t really have a vision. I'm not talking about a fantasy vision in which we all get to leave tech, open a romantic coffee-shop-bookstore and live happily ever after. I'm talking about a vision in which you dare to dream big, but you also dare to accept reality as the messy thing it is. AI is here. People around you are scrambling. Slop will be thrown at you from every direction. You can build amazing things with the help of AI. It's all true and real, so now what?

Ask yourself better questions. It's OK if you don't have the answers to all of those, but start with something and then iterate on it. Being intentional and proactive will serve you better than taking the backseat to all of this.

For example, take deadlines as a topic of choice.

• Should deadlines be handled in the same way as in the past?
• If not, how can we approach the differences?
• Do we need to add new milestones or checkpoints to the process?
• How do we increase our communication while maintaining high signal and low noise?
• What are your fallback plans?

Note that one opinion is not necessarily better than another - there are so many parameters in place. Whether your answer is 'no more deadlines' or 'deadlines with mid-dev checkpoints' or something else, it's still a solid opinion you can defend or evolve as you meet better arguments. Not having an opinion means resigning to default or inertia.

With these answers, build your vision. Not because you're the CEO of the company, but because you might have more impact than you think - in 1:1 or hallway conversations, in interviews, in brainstorming or planning sessions. Have the answer ready when someone asks a question. Knowing what you want, knowing what's ideal, will help you pave a path that you'd be happy to walk on.