The year 2026 is proving to be a major milestone in my career and, consequently, at UEEK.
Whenever I studied large national and international companies like Google, Amazon, and Mercado Livre, I noticed a very strong pattern: the organization of the software engineering pipeline. Thousands of deployments per day, millions per month. Low critical bug rate, excellent usability, high satisfaction. The entire pipeline covered by monitoring metrics with very well-defined standards for what constituted quality. Regression tests for every small feature deployed, preventing stable modules from breaking when new features are added. Crystal-clear documentation on what needed to be done, developers with a golden opportunity, and the infrastructure to build everything we see in the day-to-day operations of these companies.
However, the reality of a company that doesn't have hundreds or thousands of engineers is (or was) quite different. When you have a team of three people managing multiple simultaneous projects with a deadline that satisfies the client, you need to strike a balance between speed and quality.
My right-hand man at UEEK, Luck, always says that "haste makes waste", and the two of us have seen this saying come to life (and cause problems) a few times.
The challenges that were hard to solve
How do you convince a developer not to code two or three new features and instead focus on automated testing?
How do you find time to plan a CI/CD, Cloud, and efficiency architecture when your focus is on coding?
How do you stablish story point and milestone methodologies when you need to code two or three CRUDs to meet a deadline?
How do you find time to create documents and metrics that define exactly what quality is? What marks a task as "done"? What do we evaluate at each handoff?
How do you structure a customer feedback pipeline to capture NPS?
How do you make continuous deliveries when your deadline only allows a single delivery with 10 modules?
It was impossible to do and plan all of this knowing that these practices would compromise the delivery deadline. We even created a requirements department to at least try to professionalize our pipeline with software engineering, but we also ran into technical limitations tied to the process.
A PRD without a technical foundation helps little in AI Era.
A pain, right? I felt like we'd never be able to bridge these gaps unless we expanded the teams to work on things beyond the code.
What changed in 2026
However, in 2026 all of this is becoming possible, and I'm very grateful to AI for that.
UEEK is a company that isn't attached to processes, methodologies, or documents. If we need to change, we'll change, and that's what has kept UEEK going to this day. Ever since AI became something real, something that truly adds value, I've had just one goal: how will our workflow improve with all of this?
And it has improved. A lot. Since we integrated AI into our processes and it became a guiding culture, we have done the following:
- The technology department absorbed the requirements department, and now all PRDs are created with a technical foundation within the project's codebase
- The requirements team has become a CX team that will provide insights on retention and commercial strategies to grow our revenue
- The development and QA teams are more integrated than ever with unit, end-to-end, integration, and related tests
- Projects that used to take 3 months to complete are now finished in 1 month
- Product MVPs that previously required coding from scratch are now built in 2 weeks without any programming knowledge. And this is where I see us standing out: while the gurus tout that "the code barrier is dead," UEEK understands that to lead, you must know how to do, and we know that. With structured project foundations, established guidelines, and a built PRD, our MVPs are ready to scale, without email lists leaking out there like vibe-coders do in two days.
- We've adopted IaC as the standard in DevSecOps (a DevSecOps division was even born and established this year)
- We use MCP, connectors, and tools that boost our productivity daily, such as Linear, Sentry, Notion, and others.
- Our QA team is now responsible for validating layout and business rules, no longer performing manual testing on CRUDs, as this is already covered by automated tests.
- We migrated our pipeline to Linear, which is likely the best software project management tool on the market. This tool enables the capture of metrics, efficient use of MCP, and efficient project boards.
- End-to-end documentation in software projects
- Faster onboarding of external projects
Of course, there are many challenges, mainly related to security, costs, practicality, and AI hallucinations that need to be controlled, but the path is much more open than obstructed.
2026 has been a year of transformation, and for the first time, UEEK feels that what is planned is in step with the market.
The point of this post isn't to be just another AI guru, but to show a real-world example of how AI is changing absolutely everything at UEEK. And at your company, how is it going?