There's a line near the end of the Pixar movie Ratatouille that I keep coming back to lately. The food critic Anton Ego, after eating Remy's ratatouille, sits down and writes his review. He says that Gusteau's motto, "Anyone Can Cook," was always misunderstood. It doesn't mean everyone can be a great chef. It means a great chef can come from anywhere.I've believed that about software for a long time. Long before AI could write a for loop.I've spent years encouraging people without a technical ba

Every engineering org I talk to right now is celebrating the same number: velocity. AI writes code faster, PRs merge faster, tickets close faster. Everyone's thrilled. I think we're celebrating the wrong thing, and it's going to bite us.Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to say out loud: velocity does not equal direction. Generating a massive volume of code doesn't mean your team is moving toward the right business outcome. It doesn't mean you're building something stable or maintainabl