I’ve noticed something weird on our team since we started using Cursor/Claude Code heavily: We can ship features in hours instead of days. But now we’re spending MORE time in alignment meetings than we used to. Here’s a real example from last week: PM wrote in Linear: “Add user analytics to the dashboard” We did what we always do: quick Slack thread to align on scope. 3 engineers discussed for ~20 minutes async, came to what seemed like agreement, started building. Then code review happened: Engineer A built event tracking with Segment (frontend + backend integration) Engineer B built a SQL dashboard pulling from our existing DB Engineer C built a mixpanel integration with custom events All three took ~2 hours to build. All three were technically solid implementations. All three were different interpretations of “user analytics.” We spent 6 hours building + 2 hours in review meetings arguing about which direction to go + another 4 hours refactoring to align on Engineer B’s approach. Total time: 12 hours of engineering work. If we’d spent 1 hour upfront really aligning on what “user analytics” means, we’d have saved 11 hours. The thing is: we used to do this better. When implementation took 2 days per engineer, no one would start building without a clear spec. The stakes were too high. But when implementation takes 2 hours, the scenario changed: Writing a proper spec is just 1 hour Getting async feedback on spec takes another 1-2 days Just building it and seeing what people think takes only 2 hours So engineers are choosing to build first, align later. Because AI made building feel cheaper than aligning. Except it’s not actually cheaper. We’re just pushing the cost downstream into rework. What we have tried: Write specs before coding: Slowed us down to pre-AI velocity. Spec writing/review took longer than implementation. 15-min kickoff meetings: Helped, but now we’re in meetings constantly. Team hates it. More detailed Linear tickets: People don’t read them carefully because I can just build it and find out. Is anyone else seeing this? Where alignment (not code review, not implementation) is becoming the bottleneck because it hasn’t compressed proportionally to AI implementation speed? submitted by /u/Ok-Literature-9189
Originally posted by u/Ok-Literature-9189 on r/ClaudeCode