Automation

Enforcing consistency costs almost nothing now. Structure used to be expensive. Templates took time. Reviews took energy. Enforcement took social capital. AI changed that. Structure Is No Longer a Bottleneck We can now ask for: the same format the same sections the same tone the same constraints Every time. Without friction. That makes structure cheap. Before AI, enforcing structure was a people problem. You could create templates and style guides, but getting engineers to follow them required constant effort. ...

Human approval does not scale the way you think. Manual gates sound responsible. Someone reviews. Someone approves. Nothing risky slips through. In practice, they fail quietly. Approvals Become Rituals Over time, manual approvals turn into habits. Approve because: the build looks normal nothing failed this is routine people are waiting Approval loses meaning. It becomes a checkbox. The first few times you approve a production deployment, you take it seriously. You check the changeset. You review test results. You verify that everything looks correct. You ask questions if something seems off. ...

Complexity always finds a way in. Our CI/CD pipeline started with a few scripts. Build the code. Run the tests. Deploy the artifact. It worked well. For a while. Then requirements accumulated. Quietly. Complexity Did Not Arrive All at Once No one decided to make the pipeline complicated. It happened incrementally: add a security scan support another environment introduce feature flags handle hotfixes add approvals support rollback Each change made sense in isolation. ...