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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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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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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Before You Build a Token Economics Dashboard, Build a Value Dashboard
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Before you optimize token spend, measure the completed work, human attention, cycle time, and risk reduction those tokens bought.
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Your CRM Can Cost $3.5 Million a Month. Finance Panics Over a $100,000 AI Bill. Introducing the Inference Investment Theory (IIT).
AI value is not an inference metric. Start with product outcome, cycle time, total cost, and cost of delay, then overlay inference investment.
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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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Every Engineer Has Four Jobs Now: Track the Models, Learn the Techniques, Know the Customer, Build the Software
Being an AI power user is no longer a specialist role. Every engineer must track the models, master the techniques, know the customer, and judge the software agents produce.
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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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Would You Spend 150% of the Labor Cost to Ship Today?
Price the outcome before its tokens. A rational token budget is a function of total delivery economics, and even 150% of labor cost can make sense when it buys enough time.
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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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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.
Corporate fiction
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