Good engineers plan before building, but the traditional workflow of writing detailed RFCs and splitting features into sequential issues forces critical structural decisions when you know the least about the problem. Often, step 1 gets thrown away because assumptions proved wrong.

Three things got dramatically cheaper: Building with AI assistants turns clear problems into working code in hours. Design can be interrogated and reshaped at conversation speed. Decomposing a finished branch into small PRs is now a prompt.

Judgment in code review and product validation remain expensive. Narrow PRs still matter for understanding code. Demo working software early to catch mistakes before review.

The new workflow: grill the plan, build wide with save points, demo before review, then split into narrow PRs. Decide what to build before building; decide how to slice it after. Cleanup ships last in its own deletion PR.

At Adapt, they use Adapt itself as a reviewer—an agent with business context. It comments within minutes and resolves exchanges in under ten minutes. Heavy PRs stay heavy where architectural risk is real; frontend PRs read in minutes.