This is the first installment in a four-part series discussing why it does not matter how we feel about AI. It is a revolutionary change, and this series rethinks what the enterprise manages when nobody writes the code, and who has to own it.
Vercel took ten years to reach a billion deployments. It now adds a billion every four months, and its CEO told this publication that 60% of them come from coding agents, up from 3% at the start of the year. The developer is no longer writing the code.
What did not change is any of the process or policy around the code. The repository. The pull request. The code review. The CI gate. The security scan. Nor did the industry built around the code: the tool vendors, the certifications, the career ladder, the job title.
Imagine if we had treated an earlier invention this way. The internal combustion engine arrives and we don't build a car. We build the engine into the horse. The carriage was made for a horse. The harness was made for a horse. The stables, the farriers, the feed merchants, the coachmen and the schools that trained them were all made for a horse. The driver knows how to hold reins, not a wheel. So the engine goes where the horse was, and the carriage rolls on, faster and weirder.
That is what we are doing with AI coding. We are building internal combustion horses.
