Field notes
Practitioner essays on building production software with AI agents.
Operator-grade reports on the systems, decisions, and economics of shipping software with AI — what worked, what failed, and what changed.
Articles
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Dear Developer: Why AI Adoption Is Slow
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓A letter from the executive seat to developers, managers, and directors on why AI adoption slows down when speed outruns trust, authority, and production reality.
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Your AI Token Burn Is Not the Problem. The Work Is.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Your token burn is not the problem. It is the first invoice honest enough to show that your engineering work has no value discipline.
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Before You Build a Token Economics Dashboard, Build a Value Dashboard
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Before you optimize token spend, measure the completed work, human attention, cycle time, and risk reduction those tokens bought.
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Your heroes are outdated. Your influencers are underqualified. The people you need are busy.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓The old software heroes explain the last era. The loudest influencers explain the demo. The builders answering customers in public are the ones closest to the truth.
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Why FDE Works: The Same Reason Consultants Work
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The irony is familiar: you debate a $400 model bill, approve a $180,000 SOW, and pay an outsider to say what your own engineers already told you.
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If Your Software Organization Quit Working, How Long Until the Stock Price Would Notice?
What if the most productive thing your software organization could do this quarter is not come to work?
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The AI Soft Ban Assessment
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A browser-only scoring assessment for whether your company has quietly soft-banned AI in the SDLC while still calling itself AI friendly.
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It’s Okay to Waste Tons of Money with Bad Consulting Partners, but Tokens Are Too Much Money?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Before finance audits token spend, audit the expenses that somehow escaped fiscal responsibility: offshore teams, staff augmentation, systems integrators, consulting partners, Scrum layers, agile coaches, planning ceremonies, and delivery management. How much did they actually cost, and what success rate did they produce?
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You Trust the Lowest Bidder. But Not the Best Frontier Model?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You trust the lowest bidder's pull request. Why not the best frontier model inside a system that actually checks the work?
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Find the Ceiling
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You are sitting in the Q3 budget review. The VP of agile transformation just got taken apart over the agile coach line. Cloud migration is six quarters late. The chief product officer is presenting another reorg and another offsite. You are up next, and for the first time in three years of these meetings you have real numbers. The winning numbers. The kind that beat expectations. The teams that doubled their month-over-month spend on Gen AI for building software shipped considerably more measurable value than the teams that did not. You are about to ask the room for more money. You are going to call it finding the ceiling.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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