Every few months a word arrives that everyone has to have an opinion about. This month it is superintelligence: the labs are reorganising around it, governments are renaming things after it, and a two-letter country-code domain has become a speculative asset because its letters happen to match. None of that changes what your team ships on Friday.
We work with heads of engineering at companies of twenty to two hundred people. The question they ask is never what our position on superintelligence is. It is: my team of eight is behind, the roadmap is not getting shorter, and I have budget for two people. What do I do?
What changed, concretely
Agents can now take a story, implement it inside guardrails, generate the tests, write the documentation and hand a reviewable pull request to a person. That is not a forecast; it is how our own builds run. We installed that pipeline for a ten-engineer practice and it became the default path for new work. Two Android apps that had been scoped for five developers were shipped by one, on the original timeline.
The pipeline moves the work from typing to judgement. It does not remove the judgement.
What did not change
Somebody still decides what to build. Somebody still signs off the increment. A passing test is not a working feature, and an evaluation set still has to be labelled by a person who knows the domain. Every stage we automate ends at a human who can say no, and the stage that pushes a decision to a phone is the one we would never remove.
What to do this quarter
- Pick one repo, not the platform.
- Measure first: lead time, pull-request cycle time, review turnaround, incidents. Before any agent touches the code.
- Put the pipeline on one service, with the conventions, CI and review your team already has as the guardrails.
- Let the team run it for a fortnight without us in the room.
- Look at the same numbers, after. If they moved, widen it. If they did not, you have lost six weeks and learned something true.
Where the hype is useful
It gets you budget. Spend it on the boring version: a pipeline, a number, a person in the loop. That is the whole offer, and it fits in six weeks.