I joined Sierra 6 weeks ago and very quickly thought “this feels different.” To put things into perspective: in my last job, we had incredible AI tooling and effectively infinite tokens. But despite all of that, it often still felt surprisingly hard to translate capability into momentum. Tokens were burned, code was generated, but progress still felt slower than expected. I think I’m finally starting to understand why. Now that engineering effort is no longer the primary bottleneck to producing output, many traditional software operating models start to feel much heavier: - sprint rituals - productivity proxy metrics (tickets closed, LOC, token usage) - roadmap misalignment - cross-functional dependency coordination - layers of design architecture reviews - approval chains and stakeholder buy-in - org boundary negotiations In a world where it’s cheaper than ever to build and experiment, organizational latency becomes the real bottleneck. What feels different at Sierra: 1. Quick feedback loops: We’re surrounded by opinionated people who aren’t afraid to say what they think. It’s often faster to iterate than debate. That forces sharper thinking and better design choices. 2. Agency: People are trusted to run with ideas. The distance between “this could exist” and “this is shipped” feels dramatically smaller. 3. Directional alignment: There seems to be a strong shared conviction around direction, which creates room for autonomy while still moving cohesively. It’s still early for me here, but this is probably the clearest articulation I’ve found so far that “AI-enabled” and “AI-native” are very different things.