AI is delivering on its promise, and that's the problem.
If one unit of development now gets done five times faster, how do we deal with the five units of alignment and management we have to do?
The Harness
My calendar used to have gaps. Not a lot (I was still busy) but there were these pockets where I'd put on headphones, open VS Code, and disappear into a problem for a few hours. That was the good stuff. That state of flow where you're holding a whole system in your head and reshaping it. I looked forward to those gaps.
My calendar doesn't have gaps anymore. Not because I'm working more hours. But something shifted in what fills those hours, and it happened so gradually I didn't notice until I was already in it.
5x faster = 1.5x faster
AI got good at the things I used to spend my day doing. Using Claude, Cursor, Copilot (pick your favourite) I can write code faster than ever. I can analyse data in a fraction of the time. I can produce more, ship more, move through technical work at a pace that would've been nuts two years ago. If you're a dev, you've 100% felt this first hand.
On pure coding tasks, our team measured something like a 5x speed improvement. But total project time? That only improved 1.5x. That made me think. Five times faster at the work. One and a half times faster at the project. Where did the other 3.5x go?
Here's my theory: it went into our calendars.
The harness
Every piece of code that gets written creates a surrounding body of work that has nothing to do with writing code. It needs to be reviewed. It needs to be communicated. Does it align with the roadmap? Does it do what the customer actually needs? Do we tell other teams about this change? Is someone else working on something that now conflicts? What happens at 2am when it breaks and nobody else on the team understands how it works?
The harness is everything that turns code into a shipped, understood, trusted, maintainable product. Code review, planning, alignment, context-sharing, decision-making, stakeholder communication, and the slow process of making sure that ten people actually mean the same thing when they say "ready."
Here's the important part: harness work doesn't scale with the size of a change. It scales with the number of changes. A one-line config tweak and a new authentication system generate surprisingly similar amounts...
Continued on page /writing/ai-delivered-on-promise
