AI sped up development, not shipping

AI can generate Terraform, but generating it was never the hard part — trusting and deploying it is. AI made me faster at writing code, not shipping it The way I build software has changed more in the last year than in the decade before it. Take a decision like whether to process a new order with a background job or a webhook. Before AI tooling, the workflow looked something like this: identify the problem, spend time researching the tradeoffs, check how others had solved it in similar systems, form a plan, write the code, test it locally, then do everything needed to actually ship it. The whole thing, from identifying the problem to having it running in production, might take a couple of days or weeks depending on the feature. Now I give an agent the context it needs, the codebase, the outcome, the constraints, and each option comes back as working code (usually) in minutes. The research, the planning, the implementation are compressed. We’re now looking at hours not days, and this is