Yes, they're moving faster than you

The past few weeks I have heard story after story that has confirmed my suspicion: companies are setting a completely new standard for product velocity and ambition. If you're an exec in a tech company of any size, your board has probably asking you for over a year "how is AI impacting efficiency/velocity/etc."? And if you're the middle of the bell curve, you're probably responding with "we're trying this" or "we're piloting that" or some imprecise math that says PRs are going up 20-30% or something. In the meantime, there are companies out there completely obliterating the new baseline and shipping at multiples of their previous velocity. In EPD, these teams aren't bashful about measuring PR per R&D head, cycle time, or feature velocity. They don't find it distasteful to throw engineers on a leaderboard and show off who is brr-ing the most tokens. Their best PMs are highly competitive about how can get their ideas into production with the least amount of BS. They have agents tossing up hundreds or thousands of PRs per week and they're just...dealing with it. They are, as the kids say, cooking. While the nexus tends to be the Engineering / Product / Design organizations, there are full companies who have embraced AI to a level your pilots can only dream about. HR teams building a custom ATS to speedrun great candidates, EAs who build internal platforms for their leadership teams, CFOs that get the investment in tokens will ultimately pay off and don't get too stressy about it. YES there are teams actually doing this stuff, practically and as course-of-business, and at a speed that's at least 10x what you're claiming to be able to get. And while a lot of these are the 996 AI-native startup darlings we're all watching on the timeline, many are companies with 1000s of employees, decades-old monorepos, and "legacy" businesses you'd presume could never. Well: they could, and they are. What do these companies have in common? Top down edicts Investment in internal tools + devX Actual token budgets (like ones that would scare you) Dashboards + leaderboards + teams whose feelings aren't easily hurt At least a dozen people who are deep deep on AI (latest on models, harnesses, experiments.) Excited non-technical groups No sentimentality Skill Will All this accrues to a step change in productivity and efficiency that is measurable and ~10x what your modest projections are shooting for. So yes: they're really moving that fast. No, you're not. But you can. Set your ambitions higher. Get going.