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 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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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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As CxO, the 2 Things Your HR Needs to Do Different
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your HR is declining AI-native candidates who ship in weeks what your teams ship in quarters. Two critical changes your HR needs to make before you lose the talent war.
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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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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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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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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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Every Consultant Says They Can Fix Your Legacy App with AI, Here Is the Test
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗This is the third time your company has tried to fix the monolith. The first two attempts cost millions and changed nothing. AI agents make the third attempt possible, but only if the person leading it has actually done this before. Here is how to tell in ninety seconds.
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AI Is Too Expensive for Your Software Organization. Turn It Off for 90 Days.
Exec summary ↗If a senior engineer's AI inference budget is less than one Starbucks drink every other working day, turn AI off for 90 days and measure what the shutdown exposes.
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You Added AI. Congratulations, You Now Run a Slop Factory.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You gave your engineers AI tools and skipped the governance conversation. Now your PRs are tripling, your review queue is drowning, and nobody can tell the good code from the generated garbage. You did not adopt AI. You built a slop factory.
Corporate fiction
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