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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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.
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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.
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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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Exploring Developer Happiness in the AI-SDLC
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Exploring what developer happiness looks like when AI handles the tedious work. Research and insights on the emotional side of AI adoption.
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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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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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Goodnight to Epics, Stories and Features: A Feature A Day is the New Normal
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The sprint is dead. AI-native teams ship features daily, not fortnightly. Learn how to adapt your agile processes for the new velocity.
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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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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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First Principles for AI-Native Engineering Execution (For CxOs)
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗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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