Most enterprise agent rollouts stall. Using a controlled trial (METR), telemetry from 22,000 developers (Faros), and my own platform teardowns, I'll show what the teams getting real value changed: how they restructured work, where they put guardrails, and what they measured. Real numbers, no decks. This talk is about what the minority who get compounding value did differently at the engineering layer — not the strategy layer. We'll go through the evidence honestly: METR's randomized controlled trial, where experienced developers were 19% slower with early-2025 AI while believing they were faster; DORA 2025's finding that AI is an amplifier of existing strengths and dysfunctions; Faros's telemetry across 22,000 developers showing throughput up and stability down at the same time; and the security data on what AI-generated code actually ships. I'll tell you which numbers are controlled studies, which are vendor telemetry, and which are forecasts, so you can check my work.

Then the concrete part: how the teams that succeeded restructured review and testing to absorb machine-speed output, where they put guardrails — infrastructure-layer controls the agent cannot bypass versus reasoning-layer controls that live in the same logic the agent reasons in — what they actually measured instead of "PRs merged," and which skills their engineers needed. You'll leave able to tell whether your own environment is ready to open the throttle, and what to fix first if it isn't.