Blog
Insights for engineering leaders
Practical thinking on AI adoption, engineering velocity, and building teams that ship.
The Velocity Engineering Playbook: Accelerating Everything, Not Just Code
Your AI tools made code generation faster. But code is 20% of the journey to production. Here's the comprehensive playbook for accelerating the other 80% — and why velocity engineering matters more than any single tool.
Dave O'Dell
Why Your AI Coding Assistant Is Just Fancy Autocomplete
You gave an AI tool zero context about your codebase and it produced generic garbage. Shocking. Here's why context infrastructure is the difference between autocomplete and actual AI-assisted development.
Dave O'Dell
Code Review Is Your New Bottleneck (And AI Made It Worse)
AI tools made your engineers faster at writing code. Now PR review queues are backed up, PR sizes have ballooned 154%, and your cycle time hasn't budged. Sound familiar?
Dave O'Dell
How to Measure AI Adoption ROI (When Nobody Can Tell If It's Working)
77% of organizations can't track AI ROI. Here's a practical framework for measuring what actually matters — and why most teams are measuring the wrong things.
Dave O'Dell
The AI Champion Playbook: How One Engineer Can Transform Your Whole Team
Top-down mandates don't work. Tool rollouts don't work. What works is one engineer who's already bought in — and a system that lets them spread it.
Dave O'Dell
Licenses Without Lift: The $100K AI Tool Problem Nobody Talks About
Your company spent six figures on AI coding tools. Usage is at 15%. The early adopters love it. Everyone else opened it once. Here's what's actually going wrong — and it's not a training problem.
Dave O'Dell
The AI Velocity Assessment: Finding Where Your Pipeline Is Really Stuck
Your team adopted AI tools. They're not shipping faster. Before you invest in a 6-month transformation, spend 4 weeks finding out exactly why — and what to do about it.
Dave O'Dell & Dan McAulay
What Enterprise Teams Get Wrong About AI Adoption
Compliance theater, tool mandates, and ignoring the early adopters. Three patterns killing AI adoption in enterprise engineering teams.
Dan McAulay
Velocity Engineering: Why AI Adoption Alone Won't Make You Faster
Most teams adopt AI tools and expect to ship faster. They don't. Because speed in one part of the pipeline just exposes how slow everything else is. That's why we built a practice around velocity engineering.
Dave O'Dell
Two Engineers, AI Assistants, and the Output of Twenty
How App Vitals operates as a 2-person team with AI force multiplication — and what that means for how we think about engineering velocity.
Dave O'Dell
The Context Problem: Why AI Can't Help Teams That Don't Document
AI tools are only as smart as the context they have. Without architecture docs, coding conventions, and shared patterns, your AI assistant is just a fancy autocomplete.
Dave O'Dell
Why Tool Rollouts Fail (And What Works Instead)
Top-down AI mandates fail. Champion-based adoption works. Here's the 12-week pilot model we use to make AI stick.
Dan McAulay
Your CI Pipeline Is the New Bottleneck
AI writes code 3x faster, but if your CI takes 45 minutes, you just moved the bottleneck. Here's where the real velocity gains are hiding.
Dave O'Dell