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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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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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 Then you built something on Claude Code this weekend and realized your entire engineering organization is obsolete.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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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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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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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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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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Find the Ceiling
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You are sitting in the Q3 budget review. The VP of agile transformation just got taken apart over the agile coach line. Cloud migration is six quarters late. The chief product officer is presenting another reorg and another offsite. You are up next, and for the first time in three years of these meetings you have real numbers. The winning numbers. The kind that beat expectations. The teams that doubled their month-over-month spend on Gen AI for building software shipped considerably more measurable value than the teams that did not. You are about to ask the room for more money. You are going to call it finding the ceiling.
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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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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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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.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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