Agent-Driven Development
How engineering teams build software with AI agents as first-class collaborators: workflows, context, orchestration, delivery practices, and the operating rules that replace autocomplete-era thinking.
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Are You Prematurely Optimizing the Machinery Around Your Vendor’s Agent?
Custom skills, agents, routers, and reviewer loops can improve a vendor's agent. Standardizing that extra machinery before it beats the supported baseline is premature optimization.
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Every Engineer Has Four Jobs Now: Track the Models, Learn the Techniques, Know the Customer, Build the Software
Being an AI power user is no longer a specialist role. Every engineer must track the models, master the techniques, know the customer, and judge the software agents produce.
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I Want You Software Developers to Be Unhappy (Keep Reading, It’s Not What You Think It Is)
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The AI Engineer is a new job family, and it is the future of this profession. The "software developer" as the role has been defined for fifteen years is going through what farmers went through with the tractor. If you are still doing the old job and you are not unhappy, you have not been paying attention.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Stop Reviewing Code. Start Proving It Works. My Take on AI in the Quality Process of Software.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗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 prove correctness. Continuous delivery, not ceremony.
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Dear Coding Agent Builders and Corporate Leaders Funding These Tools: Just Give Me the Best Model
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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 making me think about which model I am on.
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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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Everything You Learned About the Testing Pyramid Was Based on a Constraint That No Longer Exists
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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 disappears and the pyramid becomes a square. Equal investment across every test type. Maximum risk buydown. No excuses.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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