Davis Technology Consulting
A few months ago, a friend asked me to review her résumé.
She had submitted more than 300 job applications and was barely getting any responses.
I knew her work. She’s thoughtful, highly capable, and exactly the kind of engineer I’d jump at the chance to hire. So when she told me she wasn’t getting traction, I assumed the market was just rough.
Then I opened her résumé.
About halfway through, I had a very different reaction.
No wonder nobody is calling.
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I thought AI was going to make me more productive. Maybe even give me some of my time back. That was the plan 😅 It didn’t quite work out that way.
Instead, it made it a lot harder to ignore where things were actually broken.
If I’m being honest, the signs were already there. Over the past year of building with AI, I kept seeing the same pattern: the tools weren’t the bottleneck. The system was.
I wrote about some of that in A Year of Building, Learning, and Laughing My Way Through AI at Ford—but I don’t think I fully appreciated what it meant yet.
I was thinking about AI the same way most leaders are right now: As a tool. Something teams could use to move faster. Write code quicker. Summarize more. Do more in less time. And to be fair—it can do that.
But that framing assumes something important: That your system already works.
That your workflows are clean.
That your systems of record are reliable.
That your teams are operating with enough discipline for speed to matter.
If that’s true, AI helps.
If it’s not…
AI doesn’t fix it.
It exposes it.
I wasn’t excited about Jetpack Compose. There. I said it.
When it first came out, it felt like Flutter in a different outfit. Kotlin instead of Dart. Same declarative energy. And look, I didn’t have anything against Flutter. Once you get comfortable with it you can build a solid multiplatform app.
I just didn’t feel the need to adopt something new. XML worked. Views worked. We were shipping.
And then there was the terminology. <insert multiple facepalms> mutableStateOf. derivedStateOf.
It sounded like I needed an encyclopedia just to build a button. I wasn’t eager to relearn concepts I already understood — definitely a lot of “get off my lawn” going on.
Back in 2017 at Google I/O, I ran into Dave Burke. He was leading Android at the time. I asked him what he thought about Flutter. Was it the future? Should we all be paying closer attention?
He didn’t tip his hand. But he mentioned that declarative UI had clear advantages. I remember nodding politely. It was Dave after all. But I wasn’t fully sold.
Years later, however, that comment made a lot more sense.
Continue ReadingFor years, my file system looked “organized.” Folders. Subfolders. Strategic docs. I even kept an Archive. And yet I still felt friction. Not clutter, per se. But instead, what you could call “cognitive drag.”
I would remember that a decision happened — but not why. I knew we discussed a risk — but couldn’t recall the trade-offs. Ultimately, I had notes — but not leverage.
The problem wasn’t file chaos. It was signal decay. I made it hard for myself to find what actually mattered.
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