Field notes
Expert opinions. Independent views.
Real experiences from operators building with AI in the SDLC, including what worked, what failed, and what changed. We freely give our content. Our only requirement is that you attribute it to here.
By Norman and Nathan — practitioners who build production software with AI agents.
All content reflects the personal opinions of its authors and does not represent any employer, client, or affiliated organization.
Articles
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Your Leaders Stopped Building. Now Vendors Own Your AI Strategy.
Executive Deck ↗Your technology leaders stopped building years ago. When AI arrived, vendors filled the vacuum. The fix is not better tools. It is rebuilding the technical leadership…
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The Tool Is a Commodity. The Organizational Adoption Expertise Is Not.
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗The performance gap between top Gen AI coding tools is not what is slowing you down. Your governance model and your SDLC are. Pick the vendor…
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Gen 1 Lights-Off Development: I Am Building It and You Can Watch
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Everyone talks about autonomous AI development. Norman is actually building it. A system of agents that predicts what players want, builds a browser game, ships it,…
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How to Build an AI-Native Engineering Team (Not an AI-Assisted One)
Most teams added AI tools and called it transformation. An AI-native engineering team requires two things most organizations are not willing to change: the staffing model…
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We Kissed Specs and PRDs Goodbye. Product Managers Pass POCs Now.
Executive Deck ↗Nobody looks forward to backlog grooming. Nobody ever did. AI made it possible to skip the ceremony and hand engineering a working proof of concept instead…
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Stop Reviewing Code. Start Proving It Works. My Take on AI in the Quality Process of Software.
Executive Deck ↗Code review was supposed to be about rigor. It became a rubber stamp. AI review will not fix it. What fixes it is building systems that…
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Dear Coding Agent Builders and Corporate Leaders Funding These Tools: Just Give Me the Best Model
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗An open letter to the companies building AI coding tools and the leaders paying for them. You built something that made software fun again. Now stop…
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Your Codebase Is Not Agent-Maintainable and That Is Your Next Big Problem
Executive Deck ↗Mike spent three weeks trying to get AI agents to maintain his Flink pipeline. The agents were not the problem. The code was not agent-maintainable. This…
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Customer Absorption: Your New Software Engineering Bottleneck
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Your engineering team can now ship a feature a day. But your customers cannot absorb a feature a day. The new bottleneck is not building. It…
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Everything You Learned About the Testing Pyramid Was Based on a Constraint That No Longer Exists
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗The Testing Pyramid was never a technical ideal. It was a financial compromise based on the cost of human capital. In an agent-driven world, that constraint…
Essential or Ornamental
Three companies. Three choices. One satisfactory ending.
One does nothing. One maps the waste. One bets everything on twelve people in a warehouse.
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