"Balance" Is Too Abstract

My co-founder read our new positioning headline — "AI broke the write/review balance" — and said: "The word balance feels too abstract to me. I could feel my brain working to figure out what it really meant."

He was right. "Balance" forces you to reconstruct what two things were in balance, how they broke, and what that means for you. Three steps of inference before you get to the point. That's too much work for a headline.

The fix

We needed something concrete. Something that names the two sides directly and implies the gap without making you think about it.

We considered four options:

• "AI outpaced code review." — Names both sides. Implies the gap. Done.
• "AI writes faster than teams can review." — Literal, but long.
• "AI flooded code review." — Vivid, but dramatic.
• "Code review can't keep up with AI." — Empathetic, but passive.

We went with "AI outpaced code review." Four words, zero abstraction. You know what happened and you know why it's a problem.

Threading it through

One word change. Two repos. Six files in strategic positioning, three on the website. Every instance of "balance" and "imbalance" had to go — not just the headline, but the thesis, the statement of positioning, the ICP, the product page, the SEO metadata, the social card.

The interesting part was that the change wasn't one-directional. The website had already introduced "source-controlled AI checks" as a phrase — more concrete than the positioning repo's "AI checks on every pull request." That specificity belonged in the canonical positioning too. So we pushed "source-controlled" back upstream into the statement of positioning, and pulled the canonical product language ("suggested diff — one click to accept", "never miss / never flag / never find a surprise bug") down into the website benefit cards.

Bidirectional alignment. The strategy docs got more concrete. The website got more precise. Both got better.

What I took from it

Abstractions are compression. Compression is useful when both sides share context. But a homepage headline isn't talking to people who share your context. It's talking to people who are scanning, distracted, trying to figure out if this thing is for them. Every millisecond of inference you ask for is a millisecond they might leave.

"Balance" is a perfectly good word in a strategy document where you've already laid the groundwork. It's a terrible word in a headline where you haven't.

The lesson isn't "avoid abstractions." It's "know when your reader has the context to decompress them." On a homepage, they don't. Say the thing.