Field notes
Expert opinions. Independent views.
Real experiences from operators building with AI in the SDLC, including what worked, what failed, and what changed. We freely give our content. Our only requirement is that you attribute it to here.
By Norman and Nathan — practitioners who build production software with AI agents.
All content reflects the personal opinions of its authors and does not represent any employer, client, or affiliated organization.
Articles
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Everything You Learned About Building Software Is Already Wrong
Executive Deck ↗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…
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Will You Make It?
Executive Deck ↗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…
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AI Will Not Save Your Monolith. These Three Things Might.
Executive Deck ↗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…
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I Think I Know Where Your High Performers Are
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗Your heaviest AI users are probably your best people. That's the easy part. The harder question — the one that actually matters — is who still…
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First Principles for AI-Native Engineering Execution (For CxOs)
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗The first principles behind agent-driven development, distilled from our published body of work into a clear, executive guide for decisions, governance, talent, and operating cadence.
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The Board Memo Version: Four Sessions, Four Decisions, One Operating Plan
Executive Deck ↗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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The Executive Operating Model We Run In Private: Four Sessions That Turn AI Anxiety Into Board-Grade Decisions
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗A detailed, private four-session executive operating model with agendas, timelines, decisions, and risk controls to move from AI confusion to measurable execution.
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You Added AI. Congratulations — You Now Run a Slop Factory.
Executive Deck ↗Listen ↗You gave your engineers AI tools and skipped the governance conversation. Now your PRs are tripling, your review queue is drowning, and nobody can tell the…
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Customer Zero: Two Engineers. One Year. More Output Than Ten.
Executive Deck ↗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…
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The People Conversation
Executive Deck ↗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…
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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