AI ROI Isn't Hours Saved

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

There’s a number that shows up in almost every AI business case I’ve seen, and it always sounds like the end of the argument: it saves our engineers X hours a week. It’s in the vendor deck, the board update, the memo justifying the spend. Sometimes X is four, sometimes it’s ten. Whatever it is, it’s presented as the return – the thing that makes the money back.

It isn’t a return. It’s the beginning of a question about a return, and most of the time nobody asks the rest of it.

AI Made It Easy to Build the Wrong Thing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Something genuinely changed in the last couple of years, and it’s worth saying plainly before I complain about it. You can point an agent at a problem, describe what you want, and come back to running code. A small team can now produce, in a weekend, what used to take a department a quarter. Work that once required hiring, a budget, and a roadmap argument now takes an afternoon and a good prompt. I don’t want to be glib about that – it’s one of the most significant shifts in how software gets built that I’ve seen.

Ai on Rough Edges

AI ROI Isn't Hours Saved

AI Made It Easy to Build the Wrong Thing