DOP 341: AI Widened the Highway but Nobody Rebuilt the Bridge

#341: Nobody’s arguing about whether you need feature flags in 2026. That debate ended years ago. But the code flowing through those flags? That’s a different story. AI is writing more of it than ever, review times are climbing, and delivery throughput has actually declined. Trevor Stuart, co-founder of Split.io and now running Feature Management & Experimentation at Harness, calls it the six-lane highway ending in a two-lane bridge.

The bottleneck didn’t disappear. It moved. Coding got faster, but everything downstream – reviews, security scans, delivery pipelines – stayed the same width. Viktor points out this is the exact same pattern from the early agile days: his team shipped every two weeks, but testing still took six months. Different era, same structural problem.

Feature flags are part of the fix, but not the way most people use them. Teams are now stuffing prompts, token limits, and temperature settings inside feature flag configurations and running A/B tests on AI agents in production. That’s a long way from changing button colors on a marketing page, which is where experimentation started 15 years ago.

The culture problem is harder than the tooling problem. Trevor has watched teams run one experiment, see it fail, and quit experimenting entirely. The fear of admitting failure kills more experimentation programs than bad data ever will. Meanwhile, the companies getting real results – a fast food chain generating millions from kiosk experiments, a global bank driving hundreds of millions in customer acquisition – are the ones treating experimentation as a permanent operating model, not a one-off project.

The conversation also covers Trevor’s path from co-founding Split to running it inside Harness post-acquisition. He stayed – which doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. Harness runs what he calls a ‘startup within a startup’ model, and he breaks down what that actually looks like from the inside, what was hardest to let go of, and why finding your ‘why’ matters more than any exit.