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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Your Best Salesperson Didn’t Pick Salesforce. Your Best Engineer Shouldn’t Pick Their AI.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your best engineer shouldn’t pick their AI tools any more than your best salesperson picked Salesforce. Make AI infrastructure, not individual choice.
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How to Negotiate Your new AI Leadership Comp
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Negotiating an AI leadership role? Here’s how to structure compensation that reflects your value in transforming engineering organizations.
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Leading AI in the Constraints
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Leading AI adoption within enterprise constraints requires political skill. Learn to build bridges, not burn them, while driving real change.
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As CxO, the 2 Things Your HR Needs to Do Different
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your HR is declining AI-native candidates who ship in weeks what your teams ship in quarters. Two critical changes your HR needs to make before you lose the talent war.
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Hello New CTO : Your Loan Engine Cost More than Giving Billionaires Free Cars
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗New CTO reality check: Your legacy systems cost more than you think. A frank analysis of technical debt and the business case for AI modernization.
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How to Win Without Disruption: The Senior Director’s Guide to AI That Actually Wins
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Senior Directors: Win the AI transformation without disrupting your political capital. A practical guide to delivering results while managing up.
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The Bottlenecked CEO: You Don’t Need New Metrics to Quantify AI Value. You Need the Courage to Eliminate the Silos That Make Measurement Impossible.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A CEO watches a startup take 10 percent of his market in 8 months. The problem is not metrics. It is the silos that make measuring AI value impossible. A story about organizational courage.
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He Cannot Hire the Engineer He Needs. Here’s What He’s Doing About It.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗When you can’t hire the engineer you need, build one. How one leader is using AI to upskill existing team members and close capability gaps.
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Every Agile Artifact Was Built to Derisk Humans Writing Code
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Every agile artifact exists to derisk humans writing code. AI changes that equation. Here’s what to keep and what to throw away.
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Your AI Agent is the World’s Most Educated Five-Year-Old
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your AI agent has the world’s knowledge but the judgment of a five-year-old. Learn to work with it like the brilliant but inexperienced junior it is.
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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