We're not a normal company
Every software company claims to be different. The "we don't need X because we have culture" exemption is special pleading. The four phrases that reveal it, and the questions that break them open.
Processes
95 posts
The CTO as prisoner
CTOs who built their company's survival by doing everything can't escape that role by scheduling a holiday. Moving from doing to enabling is a skill and identity shift at once. One thing handed off permanently is where the exit starts.
Customer support in the AI era
Most AI-powered customer support is optimised for deflection, not resolution. The problem isn’t bad agents, it’s architecture: no shared context, no real permissions, no escalation path that works.
The cost of the quick fix
The quick fix isn't cheaper. It's cheaper today. Bram Devries traces how deferred fixes compound into emergencies, and argues that naming the trade-off out loud is the only way to break the cycle.
Agentic engineering is a bottleneck
The standard AI-assisted dev loop has created a new bottleneck: us. Peter Eysermans describes how deterministic orchestration via n8n, with GitHub as shared memory, gets the human off the loop without sacrificing quality.
Nobody learned a city from a map
The fastest way to learn agentic development is to stop studying it: move in, extract repeatable patterns into skills, and reflect to compound.
The disconnect between management and engineering
A mobile app, past its usefulness, was days from being phased out. One email reversed the decision. No discussion. No input from engineering. This is what happens when decision-making drifts too far from the work.
From opt in to default
Developers don't skip standards because they're careless, they skip them because there are fifteen things to remember and the code was the hard part. The real question isn't which tasks your LLM handles well. It's what's still slipping through ungated.
I'm using my engineering colleagues as my personal agents
A couple of months ago, I was copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT. Now I'm shipping features, running tests, managing branches, and keeping documentation alive, with a team of agents doing the heavy lifting. All by myself.