Development Teams Need to Keep up with AI

The developers you hire this year work in a fundamentally different way than the ones you hired two years ago. If your team isn’t building with AI, you’re paying full price and getting half the output.

I want to be careful here, because this is where the hype gets loud and unhelpful. AI is not going to replace your developers, and anyone selling you that is selling you a problem. But the way good developers work has changed, and the gap between a team that has adapted and one that hasn’t is real. It shows up in how fast you ship.

Here’s a concrete one you can use without knowing any code. On a recent AI product build, I had the model writing automated tests alongside every feature it touched. Not bolted on at the end, but part of the work itself. Writing tests used to be the slow, expensive part teams quietly skipped when the deadline got close. It’s cheap now. So when a team ships features with no tests in 2026, they aren’t moving faster. They’re creating problems they’ll spend twice as long fixing later.

So here’s the question that tells you a lot, and you don’t need to understand the answer technically: “How is the team using AI in the day-to-day work, and what is it letting us do that we couldn’t before?” A team that’s adapted will have a real answer, with specifics. A team that shrugs, or treats AI as a toy they’re not allowed to touch, is still working the way they did three years ago. That’s a problem, and it’s your money.

You don’t need to be the one teaching them. You do need to know whether the people protecting your investment are keeping up with the tools that are changing how code gets written.

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