A Story of Generative AI and Its Impact Across the SDLC
Cornelia Davis (Temporal Technologies), Nathen Harvey (Google Cloud), Gene Kim (IT Revolution), Matt Ring (John Deere) & Jessie Young (GitLab)
This fictional story follows Jessie, a senior engineer at Meowseratti, as her team navigates the turbulent early adoption of AI-assisted development practices. Through a series of production incidents—from security vulnerabilities hidden in AI-generated helper functions to architectural missteps that break system resilience—the narrative illustrates the hidden dangers of vibe coding when teams rely on AI’s confident output without proper verification and guardrails.
The story chronicles how each incident becomes a learning opportunity, gradually transforming chaotic AI experimentation into disciplined, structured practices. Through post-incident reviews and iterative process improvements, the team develops frameworks for responsible AI development that enhance rather than undermine system reliability. The narrative demonstrates that successful AI adoption requires not just technical guidelines, but cultural shifts in how teams approach code review, testing, and architectural decision-making.
By the story’s conclusion, AI has become a powerful force multiplier rather than a source of operational chaos, showing how organizations can harness generative AI’s potential while maintaining engineering discipline and operational excellence.
Cornelia Davis is a software technologist with more than thirty years experience who drives technical strategy, product development and go to market, and helps customers leverage said technology to further their business goals. Cornelia prefers to spend half her time directly engaged with customers, deeply understanding their needs and finding solutions to their problems. The other half of the time she spends distilling what she learns through these engagements and using that to drive product evolution as well as industry advancement through evangelism—conferences and writing. Her personal mantra is “free your mind.” She is also the author of Cloud Native: Designing Change- Tolerant Software . And she still cuts code, even if only a bit of the time.
Nathen Harvey is a Developer Relations Engineer and leads the DORA team at Google Cloud. DORA enables teams and organizations to thrive by making industry-shaping research accessible and actionable. Nathen has learned and shared lessons from some incredible organizations, teams, and open source communities. He is a coauthor of multiple DORA reports on software delivery performance and was a contributor and editor for the book 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know .
Gene KimFounder, Author, Researcher, IT Revolution▼▲
Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project Graphic Novels , and co-author of The Phoenix Project , The DevOps Handbook , Vibe Coding , and the Shingo Publication Award-winning books Accelerate and Wiring the Winning Organization . Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit and Enterprise AI Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
Now: Sr. Product & Engineering Coach, Global IT Strategy & Transformation, John Deere
Matt Ring is a Sr. Product & Engineering Coach with John Deere’s IT Strategy and Transformation organization. Matt works with leaders, practitioners and teams on helping them elevate their own product, lean-agile and DevOps ways of working, and in cultivating an organizational culture of continuous learning and experimentation.
Jesse Young is a Principal Engineer at GitLab working with the AI-Powered and Foundations Stages. Prior to GitLab, she spent four and a half years at Salesforce on Heroku handling API support, enterprise accounts, and authentication systems, plus earlier experience in govtech with Code for America and 18F, and at thoughtbot helping tech companies build products. A philosophy and government graduate from Colby College, her programming interest began through high school journalism.
