Milestone co-founder Liad Elidan tells The Jerusalem Post Business and Innovation podcast that companies are racing to adopt AI coding tools without the governance to know whether they are paying off
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Companies are racing to give their software engineers AI coding tools, but most cannot say whether the spending is improving their products, according to Liad Elidan, co-founder and CEO of Israeli startup Milestone, which was built to answer that question.
Elidan made the case on the Jerusalem Post Business and Innovation podcast, since his company works with enterprises that employ 200 or more engineers, linking AI usage, engineering output, code quality and governance to business metrics.
AI lets teams finish far more work, faster, Elidan said, but nobody is checking whether it is the right work or good work. "The gains, even doing it blindly, are so high that you better do it," he added. "But you'll need to have governance for the software development lifecycle."
Milestone tracks cycle time, ties individual tickets to AI use, models and cost, and measures how long code survives in production before it is rewritten.
Given free choice, engineers pick the most powerful and expensive AI model even for trivial jobs, Elidan said. "It is a huge waste," he highlighted. "The best engineers are the laziest. If I can choose a slow car or a fast car and I need to drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I'm going to take the fast one, if it's free."
He cited industry stories of an engineer who ran up some $20 million in token costs in one month, unnoticed until afterward. He did not identify the case.
Code review becomes a bottleneck
More code means more to review. Senior engineers who once checked 100 lines a day may now face 1,000, and quality suffers. "If you are in the ER and you have ten patients and now you have 30, you're probably going to give less attention to each patient," Elidan said. Some companies, he added, now ship code to production if an AI reviewer approves it, with no human check.
Agents are typically confined to a narrow environment, while people can move across an organization's systems and knowledge, the CEO stressed, which is why "forward deployed engineers" are being sent in to plug agents into real workflows. On cost, he said a senior engineer running five agents might cost 25% more and deliver three times the output. But if the token bill rivals several salaries and the output cannot be measured, the math fails.
Elidan likened the shift to the move from horse-drawn carts to cars: some skills fade, but he rejected the word "extinction." By 2030, he predicted, one person could direct a swarm of agents across marketing, design and code, becoming "a one-person small company."
He hopes the forecast isn't gloomy. "I think it's good to be paranoid," he said. "The paranoid survive. You just need to evolve and adjust."
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