Some of the best bosses I’ve ever worked for were absolute sticklers for process, but most importantly, they knew when to ignore it. They valued predictability, and they also valued consistency. They understood that process exists to serve the work, not the other way around.
On the other hand, I’ve found that the much of the red tape usually comes from one of two places: either it’s leaders who micromanage every detail, or it’s leaders who don’t understand process at all. The first drowns you in approvals and checklists because they don’t trust the team. This is typical if a mistake happens: new checklist, new process. The second hides behind forms and templates because they don’t understand what’s actually happening, so they build layers of process to cover the gaps. They want all of the reporting to be done in a way that they can just hand it over with little intervention to anyone without explanation. Both of these types of people are extremely difficult to work for.
That said, there’s value in good process. Predictability does matter, and a little consistency keeps teams sane. Process that isn’t rooted in reality becomes drag, however. Every card, every approval, every extra step starts adding up until delivering something simple feels like pushing through mud.
As a developer today, that means two jobs at once: doing the work, and navigating the system around the work. There are days that means building tools that help me cut through the noise. (Although in most cases, these tools aren’t on the board - it’s just something I came up with to help that I often do in my spare time.) Sometimes it’s about knowing which rules are worth following, and which ones need to be bent to keep things moving.
AI helps me here, too. I’ve used GPT Pro to drastically redo a project that required several azure cards, and it was getting overwhelming keeping it all straight. The Research Pro model was likely overkill, but it worked. It actually worked extremely well. The problem is, AI doesn’t know which steps are real constraints and which ones are just red tape. That’s still on us.
AI can already speed up the work. It can organize the cards, fill in the fields, write the documentation, and automate the checklists. The danger is that it makes it too easy to comply with process that should not matter. Instead of preventing noise, it risks amplifying it, because the fastest path becomes “just let the AI handle it.” When that happens, it’s an awfully tempting process to have leadership go through the red tape documentation, and “just let the AI handle it” to refine it back down. If you’re not careful, you are literally creating work in the middle that no one on either end is looking at. That’s the greatest danger AI is posing today.
The real work of leadership and development is deciding what actually deserves to be streamlined and what needs to be challenged. If we are not careful, AI will not save us from red tape, it will help us tie it tighter.
Life After AI is not about mindless compliance at scale. It is about judgment, context, and the discipline to say, “this step isn’t worth keeping,” even when the tools make it effortless.