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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You Are About to Hire a VP of AI Capability. Do Not.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You diagnosed the CoE pattern. Now you are about to repeat it by hiring a VP of AI Capability. Here is why forcing your organization to build the competency itself is the only path that works, why it will be rough, and what the end state looks like when you get it right.
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If You Are Tracking Activities Without Outcomes, You Have Already Lost
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗People trained. Workshops delivered. Pilots launched. These are activities, not outcomes. If your transformation dashboard is full of activity metrics and empty of business results, you are measuring your own comfort, not your progress.
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If Mythos Is Real, Will the Board Wait 24 Months While You Figure It Out?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Everyone is talking about Claude and Mythos. Nobody is talking about the fact that your org still cannot ship. The models are not your bottleneck. Your decade-old dysfunction is. And the board is about to notice.
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Your Transformation Org Just Got a Fifteen-Year Service Award. Now You Want to Repeat That Pattern with AI?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your Agile Transformation VP just got a 15-year service award. The org still cannot release without a CAB meeting. Now you are building an AI team with the same playbook. You know how this ends.
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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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You Do Not Have Time for a Two-Hour Kickoff but You Have Time to Fail for a Year
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A VP told me his org only had 30 minutes for AI training. I recommended the two-hour kickoff that has consistently produced results. He said they did not have time. That told me everything I needed to know.
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I Drove a Cactus Into a House in Marseille, France
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You keep buying the fastest tool on the market and wondering why nothing changed. The problem is not the vehicle. The problem is your streets were designed a thousand years ago for donkeys. Here is what to do about it.
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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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Your Leaders Stopped Building. Now Vendors Own Your AI Strategy.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your technology leaders stopped building years ago. When AI arrived, vendors filled the vacuum. The fix is not better tools. It is rebuilding the technical leadership capability you let atrophy.
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The Tool Is a Commodity. The Organizational Adoption Expertise Is Not.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The performance gap between top Gen AI coding tools is not what is slowing you down. Your governance model and your SDLC are. Pick the vendor who will coach your executives on how to actually build.
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.
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