Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

Is AI Changing Software Development? Speed vs. Quality

1 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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A developer experiments with speed-first coding using AI, shipping fast but cutting corners on quality. This mindset erodes the traditional role of engineering leaders who used to say no and enforce standards. The result: planning and roadmap discipline matter less when you can just build.

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And if anything, learning how to code with AI has made me so much more respectful of like the craft of software development. And I think right now we're running this experiment, which is like, what if we just went all in on speed? What if we decided like speed is the most important thing? Quality, yeah, sure, it matters, but speed is the thing. And that felt like the through line in all of those interviews is everyone's like, well, we've just gotten rid of all the things that made me valuable as a VP of engineering, which was the ability to say no to things or the ability to prioritize the roadmap or the ability to enforce some quality. standards, those things are not as important at the moment as sheer speed of shipping. The value of planning is far less than it used to be.