POWERINTEL// TRELLIS
Trellis VI
A methodology for adopting AI in production teams.
The technical discipline of AI-assisted development and the organizational discipline of change management — codified, repeatable, and deployed across your team.
// THE PROBLEM
AI is everywhere. The productivity isn't.
Adoption is universal. Google's 2025 DORA report finds 90% of software professionals use AI tools daily. McKinsey reports 88% of organizations have integrated AI into at least one function. Outcomes have not followed.
90%
DAILY AI USERS
DORA 2025
60%
NO MATERIAL VALUE
BCG 2025
19%
SLOWER, NOT FASTER
METR 2025
The cause isn't the AI. It's the absence of context. AI generates plausible code that doesn't fit a real codebase with real conventions, real history, and real work in flight. Teams either accept the output and pay for the rework, or reject it and lose the speed advantage that justified the investment. Either way, the value gap widens.
Imagine a car with full self-driving capability but no sensors and no cameras. The actuators work. The steering responds. The engine has power. But the car has no way of seeing the road. It will drive. It will hit the first thing it encounters. That's most companies' state of AI-assisted work today.
// THE METHODOLOGY
Trellis covers two halves.
AI adoption fails in two distinct ways. Trellis addresses both because both are required. A team with strong technical discipline and no coordination model produces high-quality work that nobody else can build on. A team with clear roles and no context discipline ships fast for a month, then drowns in inconsistency.
01 // THE TECHNICAL HALF
AI-assisted development discipline.
Trellis specifies a small set of living documents that AI tools read before doing anything: the architecture, the rules that override defaults, the decisions already bound, the work currently in flight, the known debt. Without this layer, every AI session starts blind. With it, the AI inherits your team's discipline.
// WHAT IT COVERS
02 // THE ORGANIZATIONAL HALF
Change management for AI-accelerated teams.
AI accelerates individual output, which shifts the bottleneck to coordination. Trellis defines explicit territories — engineering, AI layer (typically owned by a hands-on PM), shared seams — along with the hard rules that prevent parallel AI work from colliding.
// WHAT IT COVERS
V2 of Trellis automates the maintenance of these artifacts through an agent that watches the team's existing signals — git, pull requests, chat, calendar, observability — and drafts updates for human approval. The methodology stays the same. The bureaucracy disappears.
// THE ENGAGEMENT
What we deliver.
PowerIntel Trellis engagements are scoped per team and codebase. The structure is consistent across customers; the depth varies by codebase size and team maturity.
01
Audit
A deep audit of the codebase and the team's current AI usage. What tools are in use, how, and where the value is leaking. The output is a written assessment of the team's AI-readiness.
02
Bootstrap
We bootstrap the seven core Trellis artifacts against the actual codebase. With the V2 agent, this takes hours rather than weeks. The result is a configured AI practice that any team member can use from day one.
03
Train
We work hands-on with the team, applying the methodology to real in-flight work. Engineers and PMs adopt the session ritual, the territory model, and the parallel-work protocols against their actual problems — not slide-deck examples.
04
Operate
We stay engaged through the first month of operation, surfacing collisions, refining the rules, tightening the artifacts. By the end, the discipline holds without us in the room.
// WORK WITH POWERINTEL
Want Trellis in your team?
Trellis engagements are scoped per team and codebase. Get in touch to discuss your situation.