Integration Field Notes
Stories from the trenches on the intersection between technology and reality.

There's an old dev comic.

30 June 2026

Manager (requesting a new feature): When a user takes a photo, the app should check whether they are in a national park.

Dev: Sure, easy GIS lookup — give me a few hours.

Manager: ...and check whether it's a photo of a bird.

Dev: I'll need a research team and 5 years.

You can tell how old the joke is because, with AI image recognition, that second ask would only take a few hours today as well. It was actually first published on 24/09/2014 — almost 12 years ago.

Same for your integration efforts: what took days in the past now takes hours. Not because AI is a good system integrator, but because it gives good system integrators more capacity to build good integrations faster.

What "research team" level tasks today will only take a few hours in 12 years' time?


Original comic attribution: xkcd 1425: Tasks by Randall Munroe.

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