Here’s an issue on top of headlessness for vendors have to think through these days, of the good-problem-to-have variety. To a degree I should have anticipated yet didn’t appreciate until last week, AI coding tools are speeding software makers down their roadmaps at genuinely astonishing speeds.
How astonishing? I have several examples, but let’s start with this one, because it’s timely. Remember the exploit affecting users of ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup product last month? According to Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan (pictured), it wasn’t just an exploit affecting users of ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup product.
“Most people don’t know, but dozens of other vendors were hit by that same technique,” he says. “Atera, for instance, was hit by the same threat actor using the same technique.”
Which made the technique in question a big enough problem, now and going forward, for Huntress to figure a long-term fix was warranted. So it designed new functionality, coded it, tested it, and rolled it out to otherwise vulnerable partners.
In seven days.
“The team was able to crank it out from zero in a week,” says Hanslovan of the Detection and Shut Down of Suspicious Service Principals feature Huntress officially introduced along with six others last week. “That would have taken three months before.”
It’s not an isolated example either. Some of Huntress’s dev teams are barreling down their roadmap at 4x the earlier speed. And it’s not just top-tier engineers doing the barreling either, according to Hanslovan, citing Rich Mozeleski, product manager for identity threat detection and response at Huntress, as an example.
“Rich is putting out more code than most people on our engineering team and he’s a product manager, not an engineer,” he says.
The picture is similar at Lemhi. “The expectation in my organization is that customer success people, marketing people, salespeople, tech people, engineers—they all are builders for their own individual departments,” says Harden. “Everybody’s creating things at breakneck speed.”
And that’s before autonomous “autopilots” from companies like Hermes and Duet get good enough to identify and fill code needs without human prompting, he continues. “The level of things that get created is just going to skyrocket.”
Literally every founder and/or CEO I spoke with at IT Nation Connect told the same story. “We’re actually at a unique time in history, in that it’s never been a better time to build stuff and make things,” says McChord, who expects Slide to complete its 2027 roadmap next month.
“The speed that we’re moving at is incredible,” he says.
The same is true at service desk automation vendor Thread, according to co-founder and COO Matt Linn. “We’re moving things into this quarter that we were planning for the end of next year,” he says.
Which gets us to the good problem to have I alluded to before. Or good problems, rather. I count three off the top of my head:
1. You may be moving too fast for your customers. Just because producing new features has gotten easier for you doesn’t mean digesting them all has gotten easier for end users. McChord’s biggest concern about Slide’s turbocharged release cadence, for example, is that “we’re actually bad at telling people about it.”
2. Fast is no longer fast enough. If you’re advancing down your roadmap at a mere 2x the prior rate versus 4x, expect lots of “why so damn slow” questions from users and investors in the future.
3. Get used to continually reorganizing your development team. Thread, for example, has turned its product managers into product engineers after discovering that 40% of its massive output gains were coming from two coders on a team of 20 who didn’t answer to PMs. Huntress is rebuilding its engineering org in response to the increasing power of AI dev tools too, and Hanslovan doesn’t expect this redesign to be the last.
“I think I’m going to have to keep doing this every three quarters,” he says.