Archive

2026 3

The Wrong First Question About AI "What can AI do here?" leads to rubber-stamp oversight. Start instead with where people add or get value, and your design survives the next model. Sep 23
Software Is Not A Single-Player Game Design docs were a workaround for expensive code. Now the real artifact is cheap, and review is where the multiplayer game gets played. Jun 13
Code Review Is Not About Catching Bugs If review's job is catching bugs, AI makes it a bottleneck. Its real job, deciding whether a change belongs, just got more important. Feb 23

The Temporary Ignorance Superpower For about ninety days, someone new can ask the questions everyone else stopped asking. Use the window before it closes. Dec 15
The Constraints That Create Autonomy Teams that feel micromanaged usually weren't over-constrained. They were under-informed, and autonomy comes from clarity. Dec 3
Orderly API Evolution: How to Break APIs Without Breaking Trust Breaking changes are inevitable. What you're protecting is trust, and MCP shows how fuzzy 'breaking' gets once an agent sits between you and your users. Oct 19
The Difficulty Cliff: Why Building Software Has Never Been Smooth (Until Maybe Now) Every abstraction in software builds walls you eventually hit. AI might finally knock them down. Oct 4
The Art of Letting Go: Why Your Platform Needs Less Control Than You Think A platform has succeeded when developers find magic you didn't put there. Most platforms are engineered to prevent exactly that. Sep 22
The Only Way to Build Trust Is to Give Trust Most managers wait for trust to be earned. After a decade of managing engineers, I think that's backwards. Sep 15
The 4p Developer: The Missing Layer in Platform Thinking Developers who build tools for other developers on your platform are worth billions, and most platforms accidentally kill them. Sep 10
Twelve Years Later After a failed startup and a decade at Google, why I'm writing here again. Sep 7