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
-
Your Transformation Org Just Got a Fifteen-Year Service Award. Now You Want to Repeat That Pattern with AI?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your Agile Transformation VP just got a 15-year service award. The org still cannot release without a CAB meeting. Now you are building an AI team with the same playbook. You know how this ends.
-
Should You Take That Job or Should You Stay
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A comprehensive guide for developers weighing an offer, leaders trying to retain talent, and executives wondering why their best people keep leaving. The diagnostic that reveals whether an engineering org has actually adopted AI or just bought the tools.
-
You Do Not Have Time for a Two-Hour Kickoff but You Have Time to Fail for a Year
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A VP told me his org only had 30 minutes for AI training. I recommended the two-hour kickoff that has consistently produced results. He said they did not have time. That told me everything I needed to know.
-
I Drove a Cactus Into a House in Marseille, France
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You keep buying the fastest tool on the market and wondering why nothing changed. The problem is not the vehicle. The problem is your streets were designed a thousand years ago for donkeys. Here is what to do about it.
-
Introducing Synthetic Users, Customers, and Personas
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A synthetic user is an LLM agent calibrated to a real reader persona that can navigate your product, read your copy, and tell you what is wrong before a real customer does. Here is how to build them, where they break, and why your feedback loop is six weeks too long.
-
Your Leaders Stopped Building. Now Vendors Own Your AI Strategy.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗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 capability you let atrophy.
-
The Tool Is a Commodity. The Organizational Adoption Expertise Is Not.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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 who will coach your executives on how to actually build.
-
Gen 1 Lights-Off Development: I Am Building It and You Can Watch
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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, measures it, and iterates, no human in the product decision loop. Here are the rules.
-
How to Build an AI-Native Engineering Team (Not an AI-Assisted One)
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗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 and the governance model. Here is what both look like.
-
We Kissed Specs and PRDs Goodbye. Product Managers Pass POCs Now.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗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 of a story card. Here is what changes when you let it.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
Read 2028, Meridian, and AgentDrivenDevelopment.com’s Survive free online.
Read free online →