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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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.
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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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Dear CISO — Your Job Is Not to Stop AI. Your Job Is to Make It Safe to Ship.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗If your answer to AI is “no” until further notice, you are not reducing risk. You are pushing it into the shadows while your competitors learn to ship faster with guardrails you should have built.
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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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Two Engineers. One Year. More Output Than Ten.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Nathan joined a scale-up as CTO with a mandate to hire ten engineers. He hired zero. Twelve months later, he and one existing associate engineer had decomposed the monolith, automated deployments, and outshipped the original plan.
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Stop Asking for “Advanced” AI Training
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Advanced AI training is a status marker, not a learning objective. Discover what you actually need to know based on your role and current skill level.
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How to Win Without Disruption: The Senior Director’s Guide to AI That Actually Wins
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Senior Directors: Win the AI transformation without disrupting your political capital. A practical guide to delivering results while managing up.
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Your Best Salesperson Didn’t Pick Salesforce. Your Best Engineer Shouldn’t Pick Their AI.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your best engineer shouldn’t pick their AI tools any more than your best salesperson picked Salesforce. Make AI infrastructure, not individual choice.
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The Board Memo Version: Four Sessions, Four Decisions, One Operating Plan
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A concise board memo for executive teams: the four-session operating model, timeline, decisions, governance, and risk controls to move from AI ambiguity to measurable execution.
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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.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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