Slow. The. F**k. Down.

“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” US Navy SEALS training mantra Another day, another data set telling us what we already knew. In the latest AI Engineering Report from Faros, the software development telemetry folks, they found from studying 22,000 developers working on more than 4,000 teams what they call an “acceleration whiplash” effect caused by AI code generation. As with other large-scale studies, more code’s undoubtedly being generated faster. Individual developer “productivity” – which I put in quotation marks because there’s no such thing – is up. Nobody’s contesting that. But they also saw the same “downstream chaos” that the DORA folks saw in their data, and CircleCI saw in 28 million merge, build & deployment workflows. Incidents per Pull Request were up 242%. Monthly incidents were up 58%. Bugs were up 54% (and that’s up 9% on 2025, so it’s accelerating). Work restarts are up 14%. 26% more of tasks show no activity for a week or more. More work in progress, more work…