On May 27th, 2026, Erick Herring sat down with Kuba Fietkiewicz and Alex Belotsky, hosts of CTRL+ALT+DEPLOY podcast at TestSavant.ai, to talk through what AI is actually doing to software development; like the cognitive traps, the assurance gaps, and the regulated-industry use cases that don't make it into the headlines.
Over his career, Herring has lived through nearly every major computing shift of the past four decades. Mainframes to personal computers. NSFNet to the commercial internet (remember the World Wide Web arriving on floppy disks?). That arc gives him a frame of reference most people in this conversation don't have, and he uses it: "Maybe bigger than everything combined." That's how he describes the current moment. Not hype, but as a considered read from someone who has seen every previous wave up close.
The conversation covers a lot of ground, but three ideas cut through. First, that AI-assisted development creates a psychological trap most teams aren't accounting for. Like spending hours approving AI output trains your brain into a yes-mode that carries straight into code review. This is making the people most comfortable with AI tooling quietly more likely to ship bad code
.Second, that the right question for regulated industries isn't whether AI replaces workers, but whether it can finally complete the work that was never getting done at all. And third, that QA can no longer function as a discrete step in a world where AI compresses the code cycle faster than a review cycle can keep up.
Herring's message to teams still watching from the sidelines is direct: change is arriving in stages, and most organizations won't recognize what's happening until they're already behind. "They're going to be experiencing it like it's happening to them," he said, "as opposed to them operating on it." That distinction matters a lot if you're responsible for building or leading a software team right now.
Want to know where AI fits in your development process? We'd love to help you figure that out. Chat with someone from the team today.
Check out the full video here: