The more you talk to team members to more you grow your shared understanding.
An issue that bugs me about AI is the reduced critical thinking as you hand off thinking to the system. I want to make decisions about how our app is constructed. I want to know how it works.
Yes, this might make development slower, but that’s ok. It certainly makes the app more robust.
I’m influenced by what I see in my feeds. I regularly see some people posting about their success with AI, and elaborate on their prompts and test structures: follow the xp rules of small slices, regular testing, and the like. I also see regular posts about the AI work taking longer and being messier than intended too. On balance, I think I’ll wait to be part of the late majority as other people go through the pain of early adoption.
I’ve also seen regular occurrences of how people talking together to work as a team means they move more effectively, than if they worked individually. I’ve written about this before. This is another way that AI seems to slow down work: people feel they go faster, but it only delays the merging of their work.
Try some of these ideas with your people
Have your people read this long piece about decision-making in the military, and how AI is removing critical thinking, and the friction of people talking/deciding. Afterwards discuss what surprises them, and what should they keep as friction in the systems they’re developing.
On a more fun note, you might want to consider playing escape the boom with your team. It is not one that I’ve played, although I’ve watched it being played regularly at play4agile over the years. You’ll find a video of a session on the website. Look at the workshop link to see how you might facilitate the game either in person, or remotely.
Go, have fun, and talk to your people to gain more shared understanding about these key issues.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.