Sitting inside software teams right now a bit of a strange experience.
On one side, the tools are extraordinary. Anyone who has spent time with the latest generation of AI coding assistants can feel it. Things that used to take hours can now take minutes. Boilerplate appears almost instantly. Scaffolding is effortless. Refactoring, documentation, interrogation of unfamiliar code, even the first pass at implementation, all of it can happen with a speed that would have felt absurd not long ago.
On the other side, most engineering teams do not feel transformed.
That is the contradiction.
“When you change the nature of somebody’s day, that is an emotional journey and a creative journey for people.”
- Gordon Lucas
The technology is moving fast enough to make headlines every week, but the lived reality inside real organisations is much messier. Scrum still exists. Backlogs still exist. Product people are still overloaded. QA teams still have boards full of tickets. Legacy platforms still need to be untangled. Delivery pressure has not gone anywhere. Commercial pressure has not gone anywhere. The software still has to work.
That gap between what the tools appear to promise and what teams are actually experiencing is where the real story is.
In our latest conversation on The Next Thing Now, Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym, put language around that tension in a way that will feel familiar to anyone leading an engineering function today. The change is real. The pressure is real. But the route from one to the other is not yet clean, obvious or complete.