Why platform teams fail (and AI makes it worse)

A practitioner's essay argues that platform teams fail by sliding into permanent firefighting, conflating golden paths (products that earn adoption) with guardrails (mandatory policy), and shipping without cross-functional buy-in. Generative AI worsens this because developers can scaffold entire services from a prompt without ever discovering the platform team's hardened templates, so the author argues the catalog must become machine-readable for coding agents and guardrails must cover everything that ships. The piece also covers the infrastructure-versus-product skills gap and when an organisation should not yet form a platform team.