Busy and productive finally look identical
Fifteen production releases in 2 days, and the uncomfortable question of whether AI made me better or just better at slicing the work small.
Fifteen releases to production in two days, and a handful of other people’s pull requests reviewed on top. It was a good two days. I’m just not sure it was a good two days because I’ve got better, or because I’ve learned to slice my work thin enough that I can’t tell the difference any more.
Those fifteen releases would once have been three or four. Bigger chunks, larger deliverables, the kind of thing you’d batch up because the overhead of shipping made small releases feel wasteful. That overhead is mostly gone now. Raise the Jira, line the work up, build it, unit test, smoke test, performance test, ship: the whole loop is cheap enough with AI that small-and-often isn’t a discipline I’m imposing on myself any more. It’s just the obvious move. Faster rollback when something’s wrong. Less surface area for a regression to hide in. A diff small enough that a human can actually review it properly.
That last point matters, because I’m not handing the review to the machine. AI is the first-pass quality gate, not the last. A sieve before the human, not instead of them. We don’t trust it that far yet, and the smaller the batch, the easier it is to keep the human gate meaningful rather than rubber-stamping a thousand-line diff nobody’s really read.
So it’s better engineering. I believe that. The problem is that the exact same frictionlessness that makes small batches sensible is the thing that makes it very hard to stop. Fifteen green pipelines feel like rigour. They look like rigour. But a treadmill also gives you a number that goes up, and it’s pointed at nothing. I can’t fully separate “I shipped fifteen well-shaped releases” from “I couldn’t find the moment to stop”, and I’m increasingly suspicious that they’re the same sentence.
I don’t have the tidy resolution. The honest version is that AI has made me a more careful engineer and a worse judge of when I’ve done enough on the same two days, and I can’t yet tell which one I’m feeling when I look at the board.
Smaller batches make “done” smaller too. When is done done turns out to be a harder question than it used to be, but that’s its own argument for another day.