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 Have a Sub-Five Miler. Your Relay Team Still Loses.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You have ten engineers who could ship the next quarter alone. You have forty more who, through no fault of their own, cannot. Where do you put the AI investment, across the floor or into the ceiling? On the math, the answer most CTOs give is wrong, and the org chart you currently run is the residue of avoiding it for a decade.
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Gen 1 Lights-Off Development: I Am Building It and You Can Watch
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Everyone talks about autonomous AI development. Norman is actually building it. A system of agents that predicts what players want, builds a browser game, ships it, measures it, and iterates, no human in the product decision loop. Here are the rules.
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Dear Coding Agent Builders and Corporate Leaders Funding These Tools: Just Give Me the Best Model
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗An open letter to the companies building AI coding tools and the leaders paying for them. You built something that made software fun again. Now stop making me think about which model I am on.
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The 2028 Problem You’re Creating in 2025
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your 2025 AI decisions shape your 2028 reality. Learn why waiting for clarity is the riskiest strategy and how to build for capabilities that don’t exist yet.
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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.
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What Got You Here Won’t Keep You Here: A Letter to Technology Executives
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Technology executives: the skills that got you here won’t keep you here. A frank letter about adapting your leadership for the AI-native era.
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I Want You Software Developers to Be Unhappy (Keep Reading, It’s Not What You Think It Is)
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The AI Engineer is a new job family, and it is the future of this profession. The "software developer" as the role has been defined for fifteen years is going through what farmers went through with the tractor. If you are still doing the old job and you are not unhappy, you have not been paying attention.
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What Got You Here Won’t Keep You Here: A Letter to Mid and Late-Career Developers
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Mid and late-career developers: AI isn’t here to replace you. But developers who use AI will replace those who don’t. Here’s how to adapt.
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The Board Memo Version: Four Sessions, Four Decisions, One Operating Plan
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A concise board memo for executive teams: the four-session operating model, timeline, decisions, governance, and risk controls to move from AI ambiguity to measurable execution.
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Two Engineers. One Year. More Output Than Ten.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Nathan joined a scale-up as CTO with a mandate to hire ten engineers. He hired zero. Twelve months later, he and one existing associate engineer had decomposed the monolith, automated deployments, and outshipped the original plan.
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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