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.
Processes
90 posts
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.
Onboard the AI like you'd onboard a developer
Legacy codebases are messy, undocumented, and full of decisions nobody remembers making. But if you can explain it to a new developer, you can onboard an AI and that changes everything.
QA is the last bottleneck
Software development's feedback loop has compressed from years to minutes, but QA remains the last bottleneck, the one place still dependent on human judgment. AI is rapidly closing that gap, and before the year is out, that final human checkpoint may no longer be necessary.
The AI Agile Manifesto
Agile was supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Many teams just rebuilt it with better branding. Now, AI-driven development is forcing the uncomfortable question: Were we ever truly agile, or just managing slow feedback loops?
Why AI makes engineering teams smaller, but not simpler
AI is changing what small teams can ship, boilerplate gone, prototypes faster, experimentation cheaper. But lower costs of building don't mean lower costs of building the wrong thing. It just means you can do it faster.
AI didn't change the economics of software engineering
AI made writing code faster, but the real economics of software engineering were never about typing code in the first place.