How do you organise for tomorrow when nobody knows what tomorrow looks like?
A friend mentioned yesterday that many software organisations are stuck in a vacuum right now. GenAI is clearly affecting them, but they don’t know how, and even less what to do about it.
At first, this surprised me. I definitely see how GenAI is affecting things daily, but mostly it’s accelerating trends that were already in motion. Sure, it’s a jump, a big one. But the direction isn’t entirely new.
That said, I understand that it’s complex to decide what to do. The information overload isn’t helping, is it? And it also doesn’t help to acknowledge that nobody actually knows what’s coming (even though plenty of people sound like they do). In some places there's a pre-hysteria vibe...
But here’s what scares me more than the uncertainty: doing nothing. That’s probably the worst decision right now. In my opinion the best approach is the same as always: make the best decision you can with what you know today, execute and adapt!
To help you do that, here are three things that are still important and true:
1
Context is king. What you should do depends entirely on your situation, not what worked for someone else or what the hype cycle says.
2
Aim for global optima. Maybe coding speed was your bottleneck before (though I suspect not for most). Where will the bottleneck appear now? What unlocks the most value across your entire business?
3
Software architecture still matters, a lot. If your architecture tricks people into creating errors, it will trick GenAI. If it drains your teams’ energy with unnecessary complexity, same goes for GenAI. If it blocks people, it will block AI agents too.
By the way, nobody ever knows what tomorrow looks like. Therefore, embracing change is always a good strategy.
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