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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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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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 Then you built something on Claude Code this weekend and realized your entire engineering organization is obsolete.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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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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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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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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Your Questions About AI in the SDLC Reveal Exactly Where You Are in the Adoption Curve—And How to Bridge the Gap Before You Waste a Year
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your questions about AI in the SDLC reveal your adoption maturity level. Diagnose where you are and learn how to accelerate your journey.
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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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Dear Jim in Detroit — Don’t Punish Your Top AI Dev
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗An open letter to engineering managers: why punishing your fastest AI adopters creates a lose-lose situation. Here’s what to do instead.
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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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Elon Musk Started Cutting Twitter Before ChatGPT. Your Company Will Take Ten Years.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Elon Musk started cutting Twitter before ChatGPT launched. Most companies will spread the same AI-assisted operating change across a decade because that is what executive incentives reward.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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