What can organisations do to improve the effect of AI tooling such as Copilot, Cursor, Bolt.new?
The key insight: to go faster with AI you have to have your house in order. The better information you feed it, the better it will help you. AI coding tools attempt to gather extensive context — documentation, test coverage, APIs, designs, requirements, incidents, and runbooks — to provide optimal results.
Organizations must rethink processes, standardize tooling, and prioritize knowledge capture. Digital transformation lessons show that tools alone have limited impact; comprehensive process and workflow examination drives real change.
As John Willis put it in the comments: good software engineering practices (test coverage, APIs, designs, requirements, incidents, runbooks) should become default context. Or as Deming said: “a bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Originally posted on LinkedIn.