Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering

Chapter 1. A Tale of Two Orgs

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Some companies are getting transformative results from large language models (LLMs); others are just wasting their money and frustrating their engineers. That’s the GenAI divide. In this chapter, to highlight what’s at stake, I’ve synthesized dozens of conversations with CTOs into two composite stories so we can compare and contrast two approaches to engaging with AI in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). I then pull out some high-level insights from the CTOs who are getting the best results from their AI transformations.

There is no element of these composites that I’ve not encountered in the wild.

Flatline Systems

Flatline Systems is a publicly traded AdTech company with over 800 engineers, a third of whom are contractors from a large outsourcing firm. Flatline builds low-latency, high-performance ad servers for connecting publishers to advertising opportunities in real time. Its code is mainly a collection of Java microservices, with C++ for much of ...