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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If Your Software Organization Quit Working, How Long Until the Stock Price Would Notice?
What if the most productive thing your software organization could do this quarter is not come to work?
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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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Your AI Token Burn Is Not the Problem. The Work Is.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Your token burn is not the problem. It is the first invoice honest enough to show that your engineering work has no value discipline.
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The Fifty Million Dollar Question, Stop Transforming. Start Building.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Every leader I ask the fifty million dollar question gives the same answer. They would not build what they have now. They would start over from first principles with something smaller, leaner, and faster. That answer tells me whether they understand how software gets made, or whether they are just running the theater.
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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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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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Your heroes are outdated. Your influencers are underqualified. The people you need are busy.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓The old software heroes explain the last era. The loudest influencers explain the demo. The builders answering customers in public are the ones closest to the truth.
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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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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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Gen AI in the SDLC Is Infrastructure Now,And Every One of Your Engineers Picked Their Own
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Download EPUB ↓Gen AI in the SDLC is now infrastructure, not innovation. But every engineer picked their own stack. Here’s why that’s a governance problem.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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