Your engineering strategy has a new failure mode

Robert Kimani, a site reliability consultant, argues engineering strategies built on AI productivity should list their assumptions, each with a signal, a responsible person and a review trigger.

Robert Kimani, a freelance Linux engineer and consultant in site reliability engineering, writes for LeadDev about strategies that AI makes obsolete within months. In his example, a leader approves five hires, an internal AI platform and a reorganisation of two teams. Six months later, developers produce more code, but delivery is no faster because review, build queues and security checks have slowed.

• Kimani cites a September 2026 CloudBees survey of 213 technology leaders, in which 57% named reviewing, testing and deploying as the bottleneck and 35% named writing code.
• He recommends matching how hard a commitment is to reverse to how strong the evidence behind it is.
• Each major plan gets a short list of assumptions, and each assumption gets a signal to watch, a named person responsible and a condition for review.
• One example condition is to reassess the plan if review capacity grows slower than implementation.

An engineering leader can write the AI assumptions behind a hiring or platform plan next to the plan, with review time as one of the signals. This is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: AI can improve the metric used to justify a strategy while making the overall delivery system more constrained.

13 October 2026: AI agents have moved the slow step in software work from writing code to checking and running it, so teams need to measure and staff that later step deliberately.