REV A · JASON WALDRIP · FRACTIONAL CTO / CAIO · DENVER · taking engagements →
I've built and run engineering at consumer scale, first commit to the hard part, for founders drowning in AI-generated code and teams scaling past the leadership that got them here.
Volume is free now. Anyone can generate the code. The whole game is knowing which problem is move-fast and which one is load-bearing. That's the part I'm here for.
The deploy has been stuck for eleven minutes, the agent tells you it can't see the cluster, and there's a token sitting right there in your shell that works on everything. Five seconds and you're unstuck. Every guardrail you built reviews a diff, and nothing you built reviews that paste.
You asked for a relative timestamp and the diff came back with a new line in package.json. Good package, real downloads, actively maintained, and you approved it in two seconds because that was the right call in 2019. The trade underneath it has flipped since then, and the habit hasn't.
You asked for a change to how pricing works. The diff comes back with a new function, a flag around it, and the old function still sitting there for safety. Every reviewer nods, because that is a careful change. Nobody removed anything. Do that at fleet speed for six months and the honest question stops being how much code you have. It becomes how many ways your system can still run.
The pull request is twelve lines. Adds a column, backfills it, drops the old one. Green tests, clean diff, looks like the forty others you approved this week. You merge it, the error rate goes vertical, and you revert inside two minutes. The column is still gone. Everything in your pipeline rests on a promise that you can go back, and that promise holds for every artifact in your repository except one.
AI is collapsing the cost of labor and execution. If we solve material scarcity, we don't end work; we liberate human potential to create at the top of Maslow's hierarchy.
Finance forwards you the invoice with three words on top: this seems high. By Thursday someone has built a deck about rightsizing instances and calling the rep, and every slide is a way to pay less for exactly the system you already have. Not one of them asks why the system does the thing it's being billed for.