The last 18 months happened fast.
Teams that hadn’t touched AI in early 2024 now use it every day to generate ideas, write PRDs, analyze research, and build working prototypes. I see it in my own work. I went from using AI a few times a day to running three or four threads in parallel, all day long.
Output is up. Velocity is up. Everything looks faster.
And yet, when I sit with product teams — startups, scale-ups, and a few household names — I keep seeing the same picture. Clogged GitHub repos. Stacks of unread AI-generated PRDs. Prototypes in various states of completion. Features abandoned by ambitious individuals who never got the buy-in to get them across the finish line.
We gained something powerful. We also lost something important.
AI has turned the most ambitious people on every team into 10x versions of themselves. But it has also made it harder than ever for them to play together.
Everyone’s doing context engineering in their own silo — generating work that’s overlapping, repetiti…
