You Can't Just Add AI

The article argues that simply bolting AI tools onto human-first workflows yields limited productivity gains, drawing a parallel to the electrical revolution's Productivity Paradox where factories only benefited after being redesigned around electric motors. It contends that becoming AI-native requires rebuilding systems around three properties—context (e.g., monorepos, unified observability), feedback (e.g., static typing, fast verification), and agency (CLIs, MCP servers, isolated remote compute for autonomous agents). The author shares examples from their team, including an agent that traced a Kafka client issue and another that found an AWS SDK memory regression.