Why Product Quality will be the Ultimate Competitive edge in the AI Era

We live in the zeitgeist of artificial intelligence — where software can be built faster and cheaper than ever before. AI has leveled the playing field, turning anyone with an idea into a potential creator. But in a world where speed and cost are no longer the constraints, what will truly separate the winners from the rest?

The classic development trade off — good, fast, or cheap — has long forced teams to pick two at the expense of the third. AI is changing this by enabling development that is both fast and cheap. The pressing question becomes: can AI help us achieve software that is also good?

From idea to prototype, AI empowers teams to deliver solutions quickly, affordably, and with surprisingly high quality. Moving from prototype to Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it’s still possible to maintain the trifecta of Good, Fast and Cheap.

However, when aiming for production-ready applications, the stakes rise. Reliability, security, maintainability, and scalability become paramount, and these are areas where quality challenges will remain.

Quality as the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

As AI commoditizes development, the baseline expectation for quality will increase. With more players able to build software quickly and cheaply, users and businesses will demand better performance, security, and usability.

In a world where speed and cost are democratized by AI, quality becomes the defining factor that differentiates winners from the rest. Companies that prioritize delivering high-quality, robust, and user-centric software will build trust, loyalty, and long-term success.

In essence, while AI accelerates the “how” of software creation, quality remains the “why” that will determine which products and companies thrive.

The $460 Million Mistake That Crashed a Wall Street Giant—and What we can learn from it

On the morning of August 1, 2012, Knight Capital - then one of the biggest market maker on Wall Street - deployed new code to its high-speed trading system—but one of eight production servers never got the update. That lone machine started running an old, dormant module called “Power Peg,” flooding the market with errant trades. In just 45 minutes, Knight amassed nearly $7 billion in accidental positions and lost $460 million. It was one of the most expensive software failures in Wall Street history—driven by a rushed deployment, missing checks, legacy code left behind, and no clear plan to roll back. This is the story of how a routine release turned into a company-ending event—and what leaders today can learn from it. Founded in 1995, the Knight Capital Group was the largest market maker in US equities. Knight’s electronic trading group covered more than 19000 securities and it’s high frequency trading algorithms processed a daily trading volume of $20 billions which was 15% of ...

CAPTCHA : A story of old books, traffic lights and self driving cars

Before we talk more about CAPTCHA, we need to talk quickly about Turing Tests. Long before Artifical Intelligence was the cool thing to work on, Alan Turing the great british mathematician deviced a test to tell a computer apart from a human. As part of the Turing Test, a human interogator asks the same question to another human and a computer. The interogator does not know which one is the human and which is the computer. Based on the responses from the human vs the computer, the interogator has to guess which response is from the human. If the computer is able to fool the interogator into beleiving that it is the human for more than 50% of the responses then it is considered that the machine has acheived AI. So, considering that we are in a world where we have not acheived AI which can match human intelligence, a machine or computer would fail at a task that humans can do easily. CAPTCHA uses this philosophy at it's core. CAPTCHA is a software test that validates if the subject...

Time Machine : Pens

Time machines exist. In fact, we all have a few in our lives. Some tucked away in old boxes, some lying in plain sight but ignored and some in forgotten memories. Most of the times, we bump across them while looking for something else. But when we find them, they take us back years in the past and invoke a deep sense of nostalgia. You either smile, laugh or feel sad. And sometimes, all of them at the same time. Pens. I had seen my father always carry one in his pocket without fail. After all, you never knew when you had to fill in one of those numerous paper forms that you get handed at in most Indian establishments — the railways reservation form, the cash withdrawal bank slip or gas cylinder delivery form. With the digitization of most things around us, this ancient writing instrument lost its meaning in our lives pretty fast. Today, we don’t care much about the pen we use. As long as it writes, we are good. We don’t really have a persona...

From Code to Customer: Measuring Software Quality Before Release

“When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” - economist Charles Goodhart I feel that every discussion about metrics should mandatorily start with the above word of caution from Goodhart’s law. Metrics should inform decisions, not drive behavior in isolation. Without context, they can easily be gamed or give a false sense of confidence. Alright! With that disclaimer out of the way, lets talk about Quality Metrics for production readiness. What you’ll find here comes from the trenches — lessons from things that worked, things that didn’t, ideas that sounded smart but fell apart at scale, and blind spots I didn’t see until they hit production. I’ve owned software quality across industries like e-commerce, fintech, streaming, and SaaS — in startups, scaleups, and big tech. Your context may vary, but these insights should hit home for most teams shipping software. Why Should We Even Measure Quality? I believe there are three reasons to measure software quali...

Chick-Fil-A One : A crispy mobile app ordering experience

Chick-Fil-A or Popeyes or Shake Shack. The jury is still out on who serves the best chicken sandwich but I am declaring a winner on who has the best mobile app experience. And the champion is Chick-Fil-A. Our phones are inundated with numerous apps. But you hardly come across one that enhances your experience with the product and impresses you so much that you stop for a minute and appreciate the excellent work done the team who built it. Chick-Fil-A One, the fast food restaurant chain's mobile ordering app did it for me. Chick-Fil-A is an intriguing company. Started 75 years ago it is still a family owned business, one of the largest restaurant chains in the US, operates more than 2600 locations, generating revenue of more than $10 billion. They have the highest sale per restaurant unit easily beating giants such as McDonalds, Taco Bell and Subway. Oh and they do this while being mandatorily closed on Sundays. Quite a remarkable feat! How do they do it? The answer...

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