The Constraint Moved: Agentic Engineering and Defending at Agentic Pace

Stuart Pearce, portfolio CTO at Hg, reports on a year of AI adoption across the software investor's portfolio, where average throughput is now 2.5x, with a wide gap between teams that have rethought the software lifecycle and teams that treat AI as tooling. He describes how the constraint has moved to deciding what to build and verifying it, how a COBOL modernisation fell from an estimated two years to six months, and why faster delivery widens the security surface. He ends with three requests for help.