Field notes
Expert opinions. Independent views.
Real experiences from operators building with AI in the SDLC, including what worked, what failed, and what changed. We freely give our content. Our only requirement is that you attribute it to here.
By Norman and Nathan — practitioners who build production software with AI agents.
All content reflects the personal opinions of its authors and does not represent any employer, client, or affiliated organization.
Articles
-
Stop Reviewing Code. Start Proving It Works. My Take on AI in the Quality Process of Software.
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
The Engineers Who Can’t Use AI Agents Don’t Have a Tools Problem
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Your engineers struggling with AI agents don't need better tools or training. They need permission to work differently and the organizational barriers removed that punish speed.
-
We Kissed Specs and PRDs Goodbye. Product Managers Pass POCs Now.
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
The Customer Product Operating Model
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Your product team spends 60% of their time on coordination that agents handle in minutes. Building is no longer the bottleneck — your customer's capacity to…
-
Introducing Synthetic Users, Customers, and Personas
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
Will You Make It?
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
Everything You Learned About the Testing Pyramid Was Based on a Constraint That No Longer Exists
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
Everything You Learned About Building Software Is Already Wrong
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
AI Will Not Save Your Monolith. These Three Things Might.
Executive Deck ↗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…
-
How to Build an AI-Native Engineering Team (Not an AI-Assisted One)
Executive Deck ↗Most teams added AI tools and called it transformation. An AI-native engineering team requires two things most organizations are not willing to change: the staffing model…
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.
Read free online →