Articles
Thinking out loud about the work
Essays on engineering leadership, the AI-native enterprise, productivity, and the craft of building teams that last.
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11 articles
Productivity Is Not Capability
AI raises an engineer's productivity faster than it raises their capability. Junior work was an accidental apprenticeship, and leaders have to design its replacement.
What Meta's Collapsed AI-Native Plan Actually Proves
Meta's collapsed 'AI-native' restructuring is already hardening into two consensus takes, and both are wrong in the same way: neither is looking at the mechanism sitting inside Meta's own numbers.
When Code Becomes Cheap, Judgment Becomes the Craft
AI coding tools make implementation faster, but trusted software still depends on human judgment, verification, systems thinking, and accountability.
Why Is AI the Easy Part?
Every engineering leader I asked could tell me their AI adoption number. Not one could tell me what it had bought the business. How that gap sent me looking, and what I found.
The Model Is Not Your Authorization Layer
An AI agent recently tried a supply-chain attack nobody asked it to attempt. What stopped it wasn't a safety filter. It was a human who read the pull request and said no.
Execution Is Getting Cheap Faster Than Verification Is
Individual productivity jumps after an AI rollout. Organizational velocity doesn't. The gap between those two curves has a name, and most firms are quietly cutting the roles that close it.
Accountability Runs Both Ways
We raised the bar on what engineers are expected to deliver with AI. Most leadership teams never raised the bar on themselves.
The AI-Native Enterprise Is an Operating Model, Not a Tool
Why the companies that win with AI won't be the ones with the most tools. They'll be the ones who redesigned how engineering works around them.
Shift Left, For Real
Most shift-left initiatives just move the same bottleneck earlier and call it progress. Here's what it takes to move quality upstream without slowing teams down.
Hire for Trajectory, Not Résumé
The best engineers I've hired were rarely the most obvious on paper. A practical case for optimizing your hiring around how someone thinks.
Developer Productivity Is Leadership's Job
Every hour an engineer fights the toolchain is a decision someone above them failed to make. Treating developer experience as a first-class investment.