Moving from Code Velocity to Idea Velocity

The Breakthrough

The author identifies that engineering teams are suffering from "velocity sickness"—a state where AI-driven output increases lead to fragmented, unaligned, and unowned code—and proposes shifting the primary unit of work from ephemeral chat sessions to durable, shared documentation.

What Actually Worked

• Separate planning from implementation: Recognize that engineering now consists of two distinct gears: planning (creative, collaborative, decision-heavy) and polishing (reviewing agent output). Avoid mixing these in a single, isolated chat session.
• Treat plans as system portals: Use documentation as a "portal" to the software system where you extract relevant state and context. This allows you to visualize the system's contours and make informed decisions before letting agents execute the implementation.
• Decouple agent state from context: Move project state into a shared, long-lived document rather than keeping it inside an agent's implicit chat history. This makes agents stateless and allows multiple agents to collaborate on the same context.
• Share plans early: Force alignment by sharing the plan with teammates before implementation begins. This moves the review process earlier in the lifecycle, making code reviews simpler and ensuring the team is moving in a cohesive direction.

Context

Software engineering tools were historically built for individual, heads-down implementation. With the rise of AI, the nature of the work has shifted toward planning and decision-making, yet developers are still using chat-based tools that are isolated and ephemeral. This leads to "agent bankruptcy," where engineers lose track of their own work, and "velocity sickness," where teams ship high volumes of code that lack strategic impact. By centering work on shared documentation, teams can retain human ownership of critical decisions and improve overall idea velocity.

Notable Quotes

• "The problem with chats is that they are the relic of building for implementation so they're default isolated and ephemeral and brain off."
• "Our work now is figure out what decisions matter and then make those decisions and then get out of the way while the agents fill in the rest."
• "You're shifting from code velocity to idea velocity."