As the circular funding economy of AI becomes more transparent, innovation slows and costs increase, it may help us all to temper our AI enthusiasm. There are many indications that the current state of generative AI is neither essential nor as transformative as the frontier AI companies will have us believe. If anything we could make the case that generative AI is a net negative for most stakeholders.

Sometimes we give a free pass to any activity that seems collaborative. Before you know it, you’ve built half a dozen gate checks to deliver a single user story. Each of those “collaborative” gate-checks doesn’t just create interruptions and context switches. It also leaves an attention residue - your mind continues to think about the interruption even when you’ve switched to the task on hand. In this article we examine the ad-hoc “huddle” through a series of questions, so we can find out how much we really need them.

Like the pebble trail in the story of Hansel and Gretel, our projects need audit trails for us to keep track of changes, communicate on a daily basis, and to onboard and align people. We discuss the five most important trails in this article. In the context of distributed teams these represent communication and documentation in the flow of work.