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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Your AI Coding Platform Is Becoming PLM. Stop Running the Decision Like Homecoming Court.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓AI coding platforms are becoming the system of record for software production. Govern them as lifecycle infrastructure, not developer preference.
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Your Codebase Is Not Agent-Maintainable and That Is Your Next Big Problem
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗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 is a new standard, and your codebase probably fails it.
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The Fifty Million Dollar Question, Stop Transforming. Start Building.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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 first principles with something smaller, leaner, and faster. That answer tells me whether they understand how software gets made, or whether they are just running the theater.
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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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Congratulations: You Just Reinvented Peter Gibbons from Office Space
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A 2025 parody exploring how enterprise AI adoption recreated Office Space. Your measurement systems train top performers to do just enough. That is not their failure. It is yours.
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Picking the Right Model Won’t Fix Your Product Roadmap
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Fix your value forecasts and investment decisions, then judge AI spending against labor cost and delivery. A cheaper model won’t rescue the wrong roadmap.
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Without Writing Out the Standard, Your AI SDLC Will Struggle — Introducing the AI Software Engineer, a Silly Name for a Serious Problem
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You rolled out the training, bought the licenses, ran the pilots, and your engineering org is producing almost exactly what it was two years ago. The problem was never the training. The problem is that you never set a new standard for what it means to work at your company, and you are the only person who can. Introducing the AI Software Engineer — a silly name for a serious problem.
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Gen AI in the SDLC Is Infrastructure Now,And Every One of Your Engineers Picked Their Own
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Gen AI in the SDLC is now infrastructure, not innovation. But every engineer picked their own stack. Here’s why that’s a governance problem.
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For Five Days His Team Was Accidentally Allowed to Be as Good as They Actually Are
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗My neighbor Bill manages a software team. His company accidentally gave them unlimited AI tokens for a week. They shipped more in seven days than they had in the prior six months. Then finance noticed the bill, and the door closed. Then Bill found a workaround.
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The Quiet Gift of 2025: Three Models That Changed Everything
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Three frontier AI models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI arrived in December 2025. The gap between engineers using AI to reason through problems and those using it for autocomplete is widening every month.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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