Notes on AI velocity

The promise of AI in software isn't doing more things at once — it's doing one thing far better, far faster. The teams I work with care about quality first; speed is the second-order effect.1

What actually changes

Three habits flip when you have a good coding agent on your shoulder: reading code in chunks, branching exploratorily, and treating drafts as throwaway by default.2

• You read more code than you write.
• You spawn 4–5 small experiments instead of one large one.
• Throwaway becomes the default; commitment is the rare act.

A small example

Here's a hook I rewrote last week. The agent suggested the proxy pattern; I tightened it.

function useTracked(initial) {
  const [, rerender] = useState({});
  const tracked    = useRef({});
  const state      = useRef(initial);

  // only re-render for keys that were actually read
  return new Proxy(state.current, {
    get(_, key) {
      tracked.current[key] = true;
      return state.current[key];
    },
  });
}

The trick: only re-render for keys the component actually reads.3 The rest are noise.

Quality is what you protect when you choose not to ship the second thing.

Measuring it

The numbers below are rough — single-developer projects over a month. Take with salt.

Talk demo

That's it. Build a few things, build them well.4