A mobile app, past its usefulness, was days from being phased out. One email reversed the decision. No discussion. No input from engineering. This is what happens when decision-making drifts too far from the work.
We smile at the 18th-century crowd for being swept up by a box with a man inside, yet today it's easy to hand ChatGPT a vague idea and treat the PRD it returns as gospel. Generative AI is genuinely powerful. We get the best from it when we bring both enthusiasm and a critical eye.
Developers don't skip standards because they're careless, they skip them because there are fifteen things to remember and the code was the hard part. The real question isn't which tasks your LLM handles well. It's what's still slipping through ungated.
The AI wave is here, and the industry is already splitting into two: those adapting fast and those falling behind. The gap is widening quickly.
Last week, we deleted 16,000 lines of code, rewrote 11,500, migrated frameworks, ripped out React, and swapped our entire CSS setup with AI. It took less than 6 hours.
Technical debt used to justify meetings, trade-offs, and dedicated sprints. AI has changed that. Cleanup is now fast, cheap, and continuous. Teams that stop debating and start fixing unlock faster delivery and better outcomes.
Conductor by Melty Labs makes parallel agent workflows practical by running multiple agents with separate tasks simultaneously. The trade-offs are real but manageable, and this is where development is heading.
A couple of months ago, I was copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT. Now I'm shipping features, running tests, managing branches, and keeping documentation alive, with a team of agents doing the heavy lifting. All by myself.
Legacy codebases are messy, undocumented, and full of decisions nobody remembers making. But if you can explain it to a new developer, you can onboard an AI and that changes everything.