Breaking Change: A Comedy of Growth, Regressions, and Unmanaged Success.

Pondlife Software has done the impossible: it fixed itself. The corruption is gone, the culture is honest, and the awards keep arriving for a company that never enters them. Then success sends the bill.Forty new hires arrive who learned the culture from a slide deck. The OEM partner demands a generative-AI feature that has already been sold to twenty customers and cannot be built truthfully in the time given. A competitor ships the flashy version first and calls it "honest." And a warm, well-dressed investor named Rill Partners makes an offer to help the company "scale its culture without diluting it," an offer that turns out to be authored by the one person Pondlife thought it had seen the last of.As an AI feature that quietly invents guests at weddings and strangers at funerals moves toward release, the company faces the question its whole philosophy was built to answer, now with the whole world watching: will it tell the truth about its own product when a comfortable lie would sell better? Sharp, warm, and very funny, Breaking Change is a novel about what it costs to stay yourself once everyone wants a piece of you, and about the difference between a culture you can preserve and one that is actually alive.