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.
Articles
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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 ↗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 ↗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…
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Every Consultant Says They Can Fix Your Legacy App with AI — Here Is the Test
Executive Deck ↗This is the third time your company has tried to fix the monolith. The first two attempts cost millions and changed nothing. AI agents make the…
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One Hundred POCs a Day
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Picture this. You wake up to three fully functioning proof of concepts, each with a complete go-to-market plan, built and validated by agents overnight. A hundred…
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Your Engineering Team Ships in 28 Days. Ten of Those Days Are Work. The Other Eighteen Are a Leadership Problem.
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Your engineering team reports a 30% velocity improvement from AI tooling. Your CFO sees 5% on the P&L. The gap — millions per year — is…
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The Customer Product Operating Model
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Your product team spends 60% of their time on coordination that agents handle in minutes. Building is no longer the bottleneck — your customer's capacity to…
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You Added AI Agents. Why Are You Still Running a Separate Quality Organization Like It Is 2009?
Executive Deck ↗If you are adopting AI and still defending a separate quality organization in 2026, you are not making a technical argument. You are making an emotional…
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The Fifty Million Dollar Question — Stop Transforming. Start Building.
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Every leader I ask the fifty million dollar question gives the same answer. They would not build what they have now. They would start over from…
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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