Tiny Jira tickets. Daily check-ins. Hand-holding. Scrum built the perfect assembly line — and AI loves assembly lines. The question isn't whether AI can do the tickets. It's whether your team is more than the sum of its tickets.
The 'missionaries vs mercenaries' framing is lazy and wrong. After 30 years of freelancing, I've seen full-timers who don't care and contractors who bleed for the outcome. It's not about employment status — it's about who gives a damn.
A thousand tiny Lambda functions scattered everywhere with no ownership, no contracts, and no way to test them locally. Sound familiar? Here's when serverless works, when it doesn't, and the discipline most teams skip.
Pipeline jockeys cranking YAML. Firefighting teams on endless rota. Developers throwing features over the wall. Call it SRE, call it Platform Engineering — if nobody owns production, it's just ops in a frock.
AI-enabled revenue feels a lot like tulip bulbs in 1637. Everyone's hoarding data by the petabyte, hoping it'll bloom into gold. But most of it's weeds — and the only ones smiling are the lads selling shovels.
The cloud wars are raging. The secret to coming out unscathed is to back open technologies, think carefully about IaaS vs PaaS, and not get locked in while the giants fight it out.