Quick Bridge: Your team is shipping more since the AI tools showed up, and somehow the mood got worse. People finish faster and then stall. The tiredness is real, but it does not line up with the hours anyone is actually working. One of my teams finished its sprint work by Wednesday. That had not happened before. The team had been using AI coding tools for about two months. Features that used to fill the full two weeks were landing in a few days. And then the team sat. Not because anyone was slacking. The spec for the next big piece was still in review, the security sign-off had not come back, and the group that approves architecture changes meets once a week. The building had gotten faster. Nothing around the building had. By Friday, two of the strongest engineers on that team looked worn down. Not from long hours in the usual sense. From a week of hard calls with nothing easy in between, and then a wall of waiting they could not do anything about. That is the pattern worth naming...

  When "Good Enough" Becomes "Never Enough" Back in college, I took an FPGA Design course that assigned brutal weekly homework. Pages of digital logic problems, code to write, waveforms to document, test cases to verify. I was terrible at time management and procrastinated constantly. One week, desperate and out of time, I asked my professor a simple question: "What do you actually need to see to know I understand this material?" His answer surprised me. Usually, he just wanted to see a waveform showing the input and output with a brief explanation of why it was correct. Not the full problem set. Not all the documentation. Just proof I understood the concept. I started doing half the assigned work and getting the same grades as students who completed everything. They were furious with me. But here's what stuck with me: the written assignment and the actual requirement were two completely different things. Most students assumed they needed to do...