Continuous Delivery Office Hours Ep.9: The compliance ratchet

Steve Fenton argues that using AI to accelerate software development without strengthening delivery practices can trigger a “compliance ratchet,” in which outages or serious bugs lead organizations to impose restrictive controls that are difficult to remove and may erase AI-driven productivity gains. He advises teams to balance AI investment across the full software delivery flow rather than merely increasing coding output, since downstream review, approval, deployment, and feedback bottlenecks can absorb added volume. Organizations should reassess accumulated controls, many created after past failures, and replace slow manual checks with automated, repeatable validation where possible to improve both speed and stability. Fenton concludes that successful delivery depends not only on velocity but also on direction: frequent releases can help teams learn what users need, while robust technical practices are increasingly necessary to deliver reliable software at modern scale.

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