A new paradigm is emerging in the age of AI-led software development. I’m calling it Are We There Yet Development. Last week a developer walked over to another developer asking for something they felt they needed to proceed with their critical greenfield project when the developer was in the middle of troubleshooting a production incident.
Looming over nearly every developer is a neverending sense of urgency from on high and an enduring belief that using AI means building at the speed of thought. As this cultural “norm” seeps into the software development lifecycle I can’t help but think about children in the back of the car whining for the hundredth time: “Are we there yet?!”.
The Question Behind the Question
“Are we there yet?” isn’t about the destination. The kid in the back seat knows the car is moving. What they’re saying is: I’m bored, I’m uncomfortable, and I want this to be over. The question is a release valve for impatience.
The same thing happens in software. When a manager asks “is it done yet?” for the third time in an afternoon, they rarely want a status update. They want the discomfort of waiting to stop. AI told them building software is fast now, so any wait feels like a defect.
Here’s what makes it worse than a road trip: on a road trip, everyone knows the destination and distance are fixed. In software, the person asking already decided the distance shrank at the first demo.
Why AI Turned the Dial to Eleven
I love building with AI. It compresses the boring parts of the work. But a compressed first draft is not a finished product, and that distinction is getting lost.
A convincing prototype in thirty minutes creates a dangerous illusion. Leadership sees the thirty-minute demo and anchors on it. They don’t see the days of integration, the edge cases, the security review, the load testing, or the thousand small decisions that separate “it worked once on my machine” from “it works for everyone, every time.” That invisible back half of the work has a shape I’ve written about before: the hourglass of uncertainty, where confidence peaks the moment the build looks done and then drains away again once real integration, real load, and real users arrive.
- The demo is the trailer. The product is the movie.
- The first draft is fast. The last ten percent is where the real work happens.
- AI made generation cheap. It did not make judgment, testing, or correctness cheap.
When the gap between “looks done” and “is done” is invisible to the person setting the deadline, every honest estimate sounds like foot-dragging.
The Human Cost in the Back Seat
Neither developer I watched last week was slow. They were mimicing their boss’s impatience, they were saying “Are we there yet?” because that’s the new norm. The pressure from above doesn’t distinguish between “stuck” and “being careful.” It treats both as failure to arrive.
This is where it stops being funny. Constant “are we there yet?” pressure does real damage:
- People stop asking for the time they need and start shipping half-baked work to make the noise stop.
- Careful engineers get reframed as blockers, while the ones who cut corners get promoted.
- The stress compounds. Every interruption to ask “is it done” delays delivery.
I’ve felt this early in my career, and witnessed bosses flying off the handle when an arbitrary deadline was missed. Our shared reality is quite another animal now with a warped perception coming from industry leaders and AI tool salespeople. Every day another article espouses the virtue of shipping 1000 PRs a day with AI, but not a single paragraph about the results of those new lines of code.
Check out my close cousin article, Date Driven Development, where an arbitrary date outranks reality. “Are We There Yet Development” is the interpersonal version: the date has collapsed to yesterday.
How to Get Out of the Back Seat
You can’t stop people from feeling impatient. You can change how you respond.
Make the distance visible. The kid stops asking when you say “two more exits, about twenty minutes.” Vague answers invite repeat questions. Specific ones don’t. Replace “almost done” with “the happy path works; I need two hours for error handling and one for tests.”
Separate the demo from the product, out loud. When you show something early, name it: “this is the trailer, not the movie.” Set the expectation before someone anchors on the wrong number.
Protect the last ten percent. That’s where correctness lives. Defend it the way you’d defend the last meal on the planet.
Name the cost of interrupting. Every “are we there yet?” has a price. It’s fair to say “each check-in delays the work by thirty minutes; let me give you a fixed update instead or you can follow along yourself.”
None of this requires being difficult. It requires being specific, because specificity calms impatience.
The Bottom Line
Are We There Yet Development is what you get when AI makes a product look done immediately. The demo is nearly instant. The product is not. Confusing the two turns careful engineers into scapegoats and trashes your software.
The fix isn’t to go faster at all costs. It’s to make the real distance visible, protect the part of the journey that matters, and stop treating “being careful” as “being slow.”
We’ll get there. Just not by asking louder.
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