Velocity Sickness: What Happens When Your Whole Team Gets 10x Faster — Matt Dailey, Ref.
Team-wide AI adoption creates coordination breakdowns that negate individual productivity gains
“Next morning you come back and it's like walking into just a room of strangers.”
Matt Dailey, CEO of Ref, identifies three failure modes when entire engineering teams go fast with AI: PR merge queue collapse, directionless parallel execution, and 'agent bankruptcy' where engineers lose context on what their agents actually did. The talk positions these as systemic team problems amplified from individual AI usage patterns, not just personal productivity issues.