Photo by Patrick Konior on Unsplash

A maturity model for shipping fast without breaking customer trust.

I made an earlier argument that deploying code and releasing a feature are not the same event, and that treating them as one causes unnecessary risk. That argument still holds. But the environment it was written for has changed.

AI-assisted development has made writing and shipping code dramatically cheaper. A change that used to take a sprint now takes an afternoon. That’s a genuine gain, but it doesn’t automatically make the judgment around releasing that change any faster or better. When the cost of producing change drops and the discipline around exposing change doesn’t rise to match it, the result is exactly what customers are describing: things move, break, or reappear differently, without warning, more often than they can absorb.

Someone asks you a question. You don’t know the answer off the top of your head, so you paste it into Claude, copy the response, and send it back.

That’s not a human interaction. That’s a very slow API call with extra steps.

I keep seeing this pattern, at work, on forums, in social communities, and it makes me wonder if we’ve completely missed the point. Not of AI. Of ourselves.

It’s 5 PM on a Thursday. Something broke mid-morning and your team has been grinding on it for hours. Good engineers, working hard, coming up empty because the system is poorly documented and the people who built it have either moved on or moved teams. You’ve burned most of the day and you’re no closer to resolution.

So you escalate. You ping the leads. You ask in the channel where someone, surely, knows this service well enough to point you in the right direction.

The blood on my hands didn’t register as blood at first.

I’d thrown my mask off after the shot. Reflex. Pain management. Give the jaw some air. The pain was sharp and then immediately dull, the kind that makes you think stinger before it makes you think anything else. So I knelt on the ice, head down, eyes on the white below me, and stayed there. A couple of guys skated over. Told them I was fine. Just a stinger. Give me a minute.

Easy save. I could smother it, kill the play. Instead I kick it out to their other forward.

Not a mistake. A choice. I’m bored and my team’s up four goals and I want to make another save. So I manufacture chaos, create my own work, turn an easy night into something that feels like hockey.

That’s the first thirty-six minutes.

The second half, I’m making four saves in a row and watching the fifth one trickle past my pad anyway. My defense is skating like they’re underwater. Passes are dying on sticks. I’m doing everything right and we’re getting shelled.