#6 - Bet on quality for the sake of your people.
Practicing the verb, quality matters...
What is the link between quality and culture? In engineering leadership, betting on quality is the primary way to prevent Social Debt. When leaders sacrifice quality for speed, they signal to the team that their craftsmanship doesn't matter, leading to "Digital Inertia" and burnout. High-quality code acts as a stabilizing force that protects the "Team’s Soul"the collective motivation and psychological safety required for long-term innovation.
In this series of Practicing the Verb, it’s important that you know that quality matters, true speed is a metric we aim to achieve, but today, I believe going faster might mean leaving mistakes unattended.
If we don't bet on quality, we end up in a Toxic Mirage where metrics look good but the team is actually drowning.
As a manager or leader you must at least prepare a environment where quality is imperative, and time seen as a enabler not has an enemy, to blame people.
We are somehow obsessed with or led to believe that the faster we do things, the better.
It’s like the idea that bigger datacentre, better models. I believe the bigger will be the mess and the price the future generation will have to pay, for something they didn’t ask for.
But in my experience, the faster we go, the more bugs, unfinished work pile up, the more stress we feel, the more mistakes we make.
So why keep rushing, when we now have technology that could give us more time to do things right?
LLMs are very useful, but offloading important tasks to an empty vessel is dangerous. Believing they can replace people is also worrying.
Instead, we should be in a position where we can get real-time feedback, test multiple paths, see the results, and then pursue the best long-term option.
It’s like we’ve lost track of time and keep trying to compress it to unsustainable limits.
Some engineers I coach now say they have to do more and more, yet they still have to review most of what the AI does and fix the errors it creates.
Feels we are no longer working for us, but to sustain a tool.
I haven’t seen true, fully automated LLM solutions like the ones in certain videos for tools like n8n. They completely break when applied to real business challenges and problems. Yes, they help, but they require more tweaking than they should.
“AI” is not a magic pill. It doesn’t know things like we do, so it can’t truly understand our reality.
Now, I train teams to use AI for proof-of-concepts, where our assumptions are validated or debunked. For simple tasks, code can be generated and verified quickly, reducing some of the administrative work we dread.
For well-defined processes with no margin for error, yes, we can apply AI and be confident it will work. But LLMs fail multiple times a day. Some keep trying to “please” us and, in the process, mess everything up.
Quality is the baseline for Humane Architecture. You cannot build a system for humans if the code itself is a source of daily stress.
Trust your people. Use “AI” as a tool to improve communication and facilitate work.
Unless your entire process is like a car assembly line, where nothing changes and automation is suitable, but even there people still verify and help assemble the cars.
But if you view your business workflow as a factory model, nothing as really change…
All of this to tell you that we should pursuit quality, especially now that we have more than enough to pave this practice.
As we move into a world of AI-generated code, the human role shifts from 'writing syntax' to 'stewarding quality.' This is how you stay indispensable.
About the Author
Tino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human one verb at a time.
AI is indeed not a magic pill. I fear, though, that it is currently being perceived that way by the masses. It is seen as a solution to all of our woes, when really, it is not
Diamantino Almeida’s reflection is more than a technical note it’s a quiet plea for dignity in how we work. Beneath the surface of speed and automation, he reminds us that quality is a human responsibility, not a checkbox. To bet on quality is to honour the people behind the process: their care, their fatigue, their wisdom. In a world rushing to replace thought with throughput, Almeida dares to pause. He sees leadership not as control, but as stewardship of time, of trust, of truth. His words carry the warmth of someone who’s seen the cost of haste and still believes in the grace of doing things well. It’s not nostalgia it’s conscience. And in this age of artificial acceleration, that’s quietly radical.