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 Codebase Is Not Agent-Maintainable and That Is Your Next Big Problem
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Mike spent three weeks trying to get AI agents to maintain his Flink pipeline. The agents were not the problem. The code was not agent-maintainable. This is a new standard, and your codebase probably fails it.
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Token Economics Is the Wrong Spreadsheet
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Three times a week now an engineering leader I respect tells me their CFO wants them to justify the ROI on AI tokens. The question itself is the part I am puzzled by. A token is a raw material, the way steel is a raw material at a foundry. Nobody audits the flour invoice at the bakery. The question is not a token question. It is a measurement question, and it is being asked on the wrong floor of the building.
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Without Writing Out the Standard, Your AI SDLC Will Struggle — Introducing the AI Software Engineer, a Silly Name for a Serious Problem
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You rolled out the training, bought the licenses, ran the pilots, and your engineering org is producing almost exactly what it was two years ago. The problem was never the training. The problem is that you never set a new standard for what it means to work at your company, and you are the only person who can. Introducing the AI Software Engineer — a silly name for a serious problem.
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Why Are You Deprioritizing the Most Important Training Your Org Will Ever Get?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You told the board AI would compress delivery cycles by 30%. Then you scheduled the training for 3 PM Friday. This is the private conversation your peers will not have with you.
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It’s Okay to Waste Tons of Money with Bad Consulting Partners, but Tokens Are Too Much Money?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Before finance audits token spend, audit the expenses that somehow escaped fiscal responsibility: offshore teams, staff augmentation, systems integrators, consulting partners, Scrum layers, agile coaches, planning ceremonies, and delivery management. How much did they actually cost, and what success rate did they produce?
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For Five Days His Team Was Accidentally Allowed to Be as Good as They Actually Are
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗My neighbor Bill manages a software team. His company accidentally gave them unlimited AI tokens for a week. They shipped more in seven days than they had in the prior six months. Then finance noticed the bill, and the door closed. Then Bill found a workaround.
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Congratulations: You Just Reinvented Peter Gibbons from Office Space
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A 2025 parody exploring how enterprise AI adoption recreated Office Space. Your measurement systems train top performers to do just enough. That is not their failure. It is yours.
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Should You Take That Job or Should You Stay
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A comprehensive guide for developers weighing an offer, leaders trying to retain talent, and executives wondering why their best people keep leaving. The diagnostic that reveals whether an engineering org has actually adopted AI or just bought the tools.
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The People Conversation
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Every executive conversation I have starts the same way. Tooling budgets. Adoption dashboards. Training roadmaps. All of it oriented around the technology. None of it oriented around the people. Anywhere from twenty minutes in to the relationship or 20 months, someone asks the real question. How do we know our people can actually do this? […]
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The Quiet Gift of 2025: Three Models That Changed Everything
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Three frontier AI models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI arrived in December 2025. The gap between engineers using AI to reason through problems and those using it for autocomplete is widening every month.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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