AI productivity gains went up on every dashboard, and the release notes are the same length as last year’s. Writing code was never the constraint. Speed up one station and you get a taller pile in front of the station that is. Here is how to time your own line.
Tribal knowledge is the part of the job nobody writes down, and it leaves when the person leaves. I sat with a team that could not tell me whether they were allowed to change four lines of billing code. The assistant at the end of the table had read every line and could not say why those lines were there.
AI sounds like someone, which is exactly why the checking stops. Cardinal read the cover of my book and has not recovered.
Text to SQL works now, on real schemas, with joins and window functions. I watched three companies hand it to their business users, and all three quietly stopped. The SQL was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing which table is real and which meaning of the word you meant.
I’m speaking at Tech Expo Gujarat 2026, November 27 to 29 at GUCEC in Ahmedabad. My session, Competence Debt: AI Lets Us Ship What We Cannot Fix, is on Saturday, November 28. Here is what it covers and how to find me there.