Slide 01
Peter does not do that anymore. Now he uses AI to do just enough. 31 queries per day. The minimum is 30. His AI generates documentation nobody reads, just enough to keep his adoption metrics up. He is responding perfectly to the incentives you created.
Slide 02
35 years of engineering experience. Can ship features in a quarter of the time it used to take. COBRA would bankrupt him. He cannot afford a review that questions his "trajectory." He is not going to do anything that shows up in a performance conversation.
Ships features in hours at an Austin startup. No scrum master with people skills. No mandatory 30 queries a day. Just outcomes. Her equity is worth more than his 401k. He is proud of her. Also painfully aware she is doing what he wishes he could do.
You will not get a dramatic crisis. You will get a slow bleed. Competitors pull ahead. Leadership wonders why AI investment did not move the needle. Nobody connects the dots back to the 30-query minimum and the HR questions in October.
"My only real motivation is not to be hassled. That, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." — Peter Gibbons, 1999. And right now, in your org.
Twenty-six years later, the fear is realer. The tools are better. Nothing else has changed.
Slide 03
Slide 04
Emma does this every day. Ships in hours. No scrum master. No mandatory query counts. Just outcomes. She is 26 with equity worth more than Peter's retirement. He is 58 with 35 years of experience and a manager asking why he is only at the minimum.
You are not letting him build. That is the diagnosis. The fix is not a restructuring. It is removing obstacles.
Do not fire Peter. Do not restructure him. Do not send him to another AI training session led by someone who has never written code.
Move things out of his way. Let him write his own specs. Let him test his own code. Stop making him wait for handoffs from people slower than his AI assistant. Kill the query minimum and measure what he ships.
Slide 05
29 years old. Never wrote a line of code. Now runs AI adoption for the engineering org. Checks in on Peter's status. Writes something in his notebook. "Any impediments to surface at retro?" Peter has heard this speech before — different decade, different scrum master, same energy.
Certified from a two-day September workshop. Now teaches engineers how to use tools they understand better than he does. "Have you tried timeboxing your waiting?" Peter has been writing code since before this person was born. He nods anyway.
While the scrum master and agile coach figure out how to prompt for a meeting summary, Peter is doing work at a scale neither can evaluate. Nobody in that room is positioned to understand what he is actually capable of — or measure it.
Slide 06
Peter is not going to leave. He cannot. But he can start caring again. A 35-year veteran with nothing to prove and everything to lose, finally with permission to do his best work. He could be shipping circles around your competitors right now.