V.P. Reed
Your engineers are already using AI. Is it making your software better, or just breaking things faster?In a 2025 study, experienced developers using AI tools believed they were working 20% faster. Measured, they were 19% slower. DORA research from Google describes AI as an amplifier: it makes strong teams stronger and struggling ones worse. And the median time for attackers to turn a newly found vulnerability into a working attack is now under a day, while many companies take 30 to 60 days to fix critical ones.Faster Without Breaking Things is a step-by-step guide to bringing AI into your software pipeline, from the first approved chatbot to AI that writes, reviews, tests and fixes code under human control, with the numbers to prove it is working. It is written in plain language, without hype and without recommending products.You will learn how to give every employee a safe AI assistant, roll out AI coding tools and measure productivity honestly, tune AI code review until developers act on it, scan existing code and test scripts at scale, give your test team one view of release readiness, let AI agents turn tickets into finished code changes safely, and close the gap between a published vulnerability and protected products.Written for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, heads of quality and test, and platform and security leads, at companies of fifty people or fifty thousand. Twenty-six chapters follow a six-level ladder, and every chapter ends with a checklist. The appendices include templates for an AI usage policy, a vendor scorecard, AI code review rules and every measure in the book. Every figure is sourced.Written by an engineer who built AI into every stage of the continuous integration pipeline of a large engineering organization. V. P. Reed is also the author of Is AI for You?
