EVENT
The Austin Software Company
The mid-sized Austin software company whose AI adoption quadrupled lines of code and tripled defect rates within six months — the paradigmatic case of artifact-level success masking assumption-level failure.
A mid-sized software company in Austin adopted AI coding tools across its entire engineering organization in the fall of 2025. Within eight weeks, the metrics were spectacular: lines of code per engineer per week up fourfold, feature velocity doubled, the backlog shrinking for the first time in the company's history. The CTO presented the results at an all-hands meeting with a celebratory slide deck. Six months later, the defect rate had tripled, two senior engineers had quietly resigned, and the backlog was growing again because the rapidly shipped features were generating cascades of bugs that consumed more engineering time to fix than the features had taken to build. The metrics had been accurate. The interpretation had been catastrophically wrong.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The case functions as the anchor empirical example for Schein's three-level framework applied to AI adoption. The artifacts — lines of code, features shipped, backlog reduction — changed rapidly and dramatically. The espoused values aligned