February 2026 — When speed breaks old rules

And like that… We’re into February. Luckily, I had some quiet time in January to think about AI-augmented product development, and I would like to share some insights:

Speed Compounds. Clopus 4.5 smashes out great code. But it takes 5 minutes. That used to seem like greased lightning. Now… Come on mate, hurry up! Allegedly there will be a new faster model (Sonnet 5??) released on Tuesday. I can’t even imagine what this looks like in a couple of years.

The Return To Waterfall. Sort of. The premise of Agile assumes that developer time is critical, so it optimises for minimising rework. Agile doesn’t move faster, it tightens feedback loops and avoids futile activities (like much of planning). No longer. Developer time is comically cheap. A rethought ‘sprint’ is 50% ensuring the specification is correct, 30% validating what was built. That’s a mini-waterfall. And that’s fine.

What Was Old Is New. UML, ITSM, TOGAF: strong frameworks that failed in practice because overhead was unbearable (enter Agile). But if AI is creating the artifacts, then formal rigour suddenly beats our arbitrary flailings. These ideas were always solid, we just couldn’t make them work in a realistic scenario. The academics have re-entered the fight.

Mi Parolas Esperanton. If we’re barely reading code anymore, then skill with Claude Code overrides specific languages. I don’t really care if your platform is written in Java or C++, I care more that I know how to get Claude Code to optimise it. This is a wild departure to previous approaches to hiring and training.

Testing, Interrupted. Generated code usually works first time. Unit tests may no longer be the base of the pyramid. Focusing on integration tests, and their associated mocks, makes more sense.

Context Is King. Job number one is getting all of the relevant documentation into context. Onboarding docs? In context. Bugfix FAQ? In context. Project roadmap? You guessed it. Spec Driven Development handles this, but since code is the ultimate documentation, perhaps putting everything into a monorepo and offering it up is best? The consensus is that this approach is correct. I am skeptical; Clopus can go on a side quest and “fix” code completely unrelated to the task at hand (plus search overhead). I think a well-defined mechanism to share API and library function definitions with the agent is more important than the literal code definitions.

Volatility does not equal speed. Agents change a lot of features, fast. Source code volatility becomes difficult, and as orchestrators and architects we need to factor out the hotspots quickly in order for multiple developers and agents to play well together on a shared code base.

Poets of Code, Lament. The quality of code will go down. But as long as it does what the author intends, this will increasingly not be a problem - you’re not writing for human readers any more. Security concerns are more important than ever: vibe then verify.

The Only Way Is Up. Yeah ok some of your code is shitty. With every upgraded model, we can reassess the codebase and we’ll improve it. We’re still so early.

As my boy Scar once said: Be Prepared.

Reflections On The Mission

As a bored young child, I found the section of our family Amstrad computer’s manual on the programming language BASIC. I was hooked.

I had a passion for creating useful products out of my imagination - which continued unabated as I became a teenager, went to University, got a job.

But as one progresses through their career, other things become important. Stakeholder management. Sales. Project tracking. People leadership.

There is nothing stopping you from doing all that stuff and still writing code. But it’s very disruptive to flow, and it takes a while to context switch. See the famous Paul Graham article: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. 

Let’s call this Time To Flow. How long does it take before one achieves a state of flow?

Without flow, coding is not fun. So it becomes increasingly difficult to have fun coding. Eventually, most give up and resign themselves to becoming some form of manager.  The Time To Flow is too high a price, we can’t carve it out.

This has changed. It is my belief that Claude Code has unlocked a repressed desire in an entire generation of senior technologists.

The unlock is almost instantaneous Time To Flow. With Clopus at my fingertips, it feels like seconds. 5 minutes between meetings? Plenty of time to smash out a feature!

Perhaps a linguistic clue was there all along - Claude Code is great at context management, and we literally call this distraction context switching. By outsourcing context, we can focus on build.

And build we do! The passion is back after all those years.

This is unprecedented, and shifts the success criteria to agency and taste. Perhaps not for every domain - low latency trading systems jump to mind - but for the majority of human endeavour? You bet your ass. Plus those outlier areas have specialists deep in the flow anyway.

How does one build agency and taste? That’s a harder question. In my mind it mostly comes down to Just Fscking Do It. It’s only through trying that we work out what we’re good at, and more importantly what we enjoy.

There are probably parallels for other domains. Do you have a passion, unobtainable due to the Time to Flow? Try Claude Code or Cowork - it’s not just for coding!

And I think over the next few years we’re going to see a bunch of grizzled veterans coming out of retirement, purely for the love of the game…

Interesting Articles

• AddyOsmani.com - 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google - surprisingly high quality. Mandatory reading for tech workers in any large organization.

• Introducing Cowork - Claude Code level capability for the rest of the company? What could possibly go wrong?! Still, better than installing OpenClaw.

• A Final Message From Scott Adams - the Dilbert creator died, but left a message for us. I don’t agree with everything he believed in, but I think we can all agree that Dilbert provided a brief laugh when we may have needed it most. Fsck I’m getting old.

This Is The Way

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

Until next month. Together, We Build {+}

Ned & the MISSION+ team

P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!