AI is going Ballistic
About this session
AI collapses how long code takes to write — three days of work now takes an hour. That's real. But writing code was never the whole delivery cycle, and DORA's 2025 data proves the gap: 98% more pull requests merged with AI tools, organizational delivery flat. Code got faster. Delivery didn't.
Here's the part most teams miss: the old cycle had a built-in safety margin — the days it took to write code doubled as a window to notice you were off target and correct before shipping. Compress the writing to an hour and that margin disappears with it, not because delivery sped up, but because there's no longer room inside execution to catch a bad aim.
Drawing on 40 years of technology leadership, a stint leading a global consulting methodology practice, and 14+ production AI implementations across logistics, financial services, and healthcare, this session introduces Ballistic Development — a targeting practice that moves correction upstream, before code starts, so the entire delivery cycle can safely compress too, not just the writing.
You'll leave with a way to separate technical debt from positional debt, why AI-generated code creates comprehension debt documentation can't fix, and how to measure targeting accuracy instead of throughput.
Speaker
Key takeaways
- AI compresses code-writing time, not the delivery cycle around it, and that distinction, not AI itself, is why 98% more pull requests merged hasn't moved organizational delivery
- The safety margin that just disappeared was never a separate step. It was a byproduct of slow writing,so losing it is a symptom of a margin that depended on slowness, not a symptom of going faster
- How moving targeting upstream, before code starts instead of correcting during, lets the entire delivery cycle compress safely, not just the writing