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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Will You Make It?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You waited on cloud. You waited on DevOps. You pushed out the people who tried to fix it. You still have a manual QA team. Your board is already comparing you to companies half your size shipping twice as fast. This isn’t about your team. It’s about you.
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Everything You Learned About Building Software Is Already Wrong
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You read Brooks. You read Fowler. You read The Phoenix Project and highlighted the good parts. Then you built something on Claude Code this weekend and realized your entire engineering organization is obsolete. Here is what building software actually looks like in 2026.
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The AI Soft Ban Assessment
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A browser-only scoring assessment for whether your company has quietly soft-banned AI in the SDLC while still calling itself AI friendly.
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AI Will Not Save Your Monolith. These Three Things Might.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Every executive wants AI to magically modernize their 10 million line monolith. It won’t. Here’s what you actually need, and why you’ve been asking the wrong question for the last two years.
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Customer Absorption: Your New Software Engineering Bottleneck
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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 is receiving.
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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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One Hundred POCs a Day
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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 started. Three survived. This is not 2030. You could have done this last month.
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Token Economics Is the Wrong Spreadsheet
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Three times a week now an engineering leader I respect tells me their CFO wants them to justify the ROI on AI tokens. The question itself is the part I am puzzled by. A token is a raw material, the way steel is a raw material at a foundry. Nobody audits the flour invoice at the bakery. The question is not a token question. It is a measurement question, and it is being asked on the wrong floor of the building.
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Leading AI in the Constraints
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Leading AI adoption within enterprise constraints requires political skill. Learn to build bridges, not burn them, while driving real change.
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It’s Okay to Waste Tons of Money with Bad Consulting Partners, but Tokens Are Too Much Money?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Before finance audits token spend, audit the expenses that somehow escaped fiscal responsibility: offshore teams, staff augmentation, systems integrators, consulting partners, Scrum layers, agile coaches, planning ceremonies, and delivery management. How much did they actually cost, and what success rate did they produce?
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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