Part 2 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract - what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. Stripe never skipped the boring stuff. They ship 1,300 AI PRs a week. Amazon skipped it. Their storefront went down for six hours. Kent Beck wrote the answer in Extreme Programming Explained in 1999 . We read it. Then chose velocity anyway. A friend of mine leads engineering at a funded startup. Sharp person. Good instincts. We talk regularly about what's actually happening in engineering. Not the conference version. The real version. Last month he told me something that has been sitting with me since. His board had just seen another AI productivity deck. The kind with the 4.5x velocity slide. He said: "I need to show something in three weeks or I'll be the only person in the room without a number." I've heard variations of this from almost every engineering leader I know right now. The pressure isn't coming from incompetence.…