Things to Consider in the AI Age

Things to Consider in the AI Age

Everyone is talking about AI adoption.

Budgets are being approved.

Pilots are being launched.

Tools are being purchased.

After many years in IT — and many years as a software engineer and architect — here’s what I’m seeing:

Most organizations are focusing on acceleration

without addressing accumulation.

And that’s where risk quietly grows.

1️⃣ AI Does Not Fix Entropy

If your organization already has:

• Hundreds of repositories

• Duplicate business logic

• Limited architectural intent

• Inconsistent documentation

• Teams optimized purely for feature velocity

AI will accelerate the same dysfunction.

It will help you produce faster.

It will not help you compound better.

2️⃣ Speed Without Structure Multiplies Waste

AI can generate:

• Code

• Tests

• Documentation

• Automation

• Integration layers

But without structural clarity:

• Duplication increases

• Architectural drift expands

• Knowledge fragments

• Governance becomes reactive

Faster chaos is still chaos.

3️⃣ The Real AI Arbitrage

Everyone is chasing new AI-driven value.

Few are reclaiming lost value.

Organizations are spending millions on AI initiatives

while quietly bleeding millions through:

• Rewrites

• Onboarding delays

• Redundant features

• Governance resets

• Architectural rework every few years

The real arbitrage opportunity?

Use AI to expose entropy.

• Detect duplication across repositories

• Surface architectural drift

• Infer missing intent

• Identify patterns of waste

• Create lightweight guardrails that enable delivery instead of blocking it

That’s leverage.

4️⃣ AI Is a Multiplier — Not a Strategy

If your culture rewards:

“Ship it now. Fix it later.”

AI will reward that behavior at scale.

If your culture rewards:

Clarity, reuse, architectural intent, long-term compounding

AI becomes transformative.

5️⃣ What I’m Watching

I’m not watching who adopts AI first.

I’m watching who:

• Instruments their engineering ecosystem

• Measures architectural health

• Aligns incentives to compound value

• Uses AI to support governance instead of replace thinking

That’s where durable advantage lives.

Final Thought

AI is not the competitive edge.

Compounding engineering discipline — amplified by AI — is.

If we don’t address entropy,

AI will simply help us build the next generation of legacy systems… faster.

—

Mark Kendall

Architect | Compounding Systems | AI + Structural Governance