OpenAI's new model codes 15x faster. Cool. Does it understand your production constraints? Your incident history? Your team's capacity? Or does it just generate faster technical debt?

The demos show AI agents collaborating beautifully. Production shows them fighting over shared state at 3am. We've been in both rooms. The second one is where self-operating systems actually get built.

Your AI wrote a feature in 10 minutes. Great. Now who's maintaining it at 2am when it breaks? Who's watching the drift? Who's managing the debt? Self-operating ≠ supervised constantly.

Everyone's hyped about 16 Claude agents building a C compiler. Nobody's talking about the engineering hours babysitting them. That ratio? That's your actual AI ROI.