AI Tools Aren’t That Hard…

...if you've got your house in order.

A takeaway from Luca Rossi's great newsletter ( refactoring.fm ) where he interviewed and analyzed lots of development teams and how they were or weren't getting good results from AI.

Some people will convince you there is a whole new world to learn about agents, skills, tools, and while it is true that you need to get yourself somewhat comfortable with these, we are engineers, dammit! It’s all kinda easy to wrap our heads around.

And even if you're not an engineer: There's no crazy magic involved in setting up something like Claude Cowork. No, the magic happens in everything around it. If your documents, processes, and workflows are a mess, AI will make it an even worse mess. If they are in good order, AI will supercharge them.

What's nice about this: It gives you a strong incentive to improve the existing workflow. Even if you then don't add any AI to it, you'll reap rewards. The AI just is a cherry on top.

Luca's newsletter is specifically for software engineering teams, but the principle applies to all kinds of businesses and their internal processes. To use AI to its full potential, focus on where friction exists in the process. Identify the one bottleneck in the system that prevents value from flowing through it and optimize that. And maybe you find at that point you don't even need any fancy AI. Great, just move on to optimize the next bottleneck!

And if you feel, in the end, that there should be something AI can do to really alleviate a bottleneck, we're here to help.