Dhanji R. Prasanna

The companies not feeling success with AI are throwing tools at their giant codebases hoping good things will happen. That's not how it plays out. AI still underperforms humans on architecture, design, and complex systems thinking — lean into that as humans.

Conway's Law: you ship your org structure. How your teams are organized and how they relate to each other determines what you build. Changing outcomes without changing the structure of relationships is nearly impossible.

Moving from a GM structure to a functional org structure probably did more for our productivity than any AI tool. If you want to be more technically excellent, start with how your org is structured — not which tools you adopt.

An engineer built a system where Goose watches his screen and listens to his conversations all day. A few hours after discussing a feature idea with a colleague on Slack — Goose has already built it and opened a PR. This is where things are going.

What if every single release deleted your entire app and rebuilt it from scratch? You can't do that today. But that's the direction AI is taking us — and the conventional wisdom of 'never do a full rewrite' may no longer apply.

The biggest productivity wins from AI at Block aren't coming from engineers — they're coming from non-technical teams building their own software tools. Enterprise risk management compressing weeks of work into hours. The lines between 'technical' and 'non-technical' are blurring fast.