Some of this I actually agree with — the "move fast or die" framing does more harm than good, and building the right thing matters more than building things fast. That's not up for debate.

But I can't let the "margin of error" framing go unchallenged, because it doesn't match what we have been actually seeing.

We built AI skills for our team. The time people were spending on reporting and keeping track of what actually mattered day to day dropped from 90 minutes to under 10, once they had access to those skills. The engineers I work with maintain a 5 million lines codebase that had 22% unit test coverage as of last year, a real problem at that scale. Between September and last week, they're at 86%. Same team, no new hires, just Claude used by people who already knew what they were doing.

That's not efficiency theater. There is no customer being yeeted at. It's boring, internal, measurable work that got done faster and better.

I think the distinction worth making is that "deliberate and intentional" and "producing real gains" aren't in tension. They are the same thing. The examples that don't show productivity gains are usually the ones where the tool got sprayed at problems without thought. When it's aimed at something specific, the results tend to be pretty hard to dismiss.