Courage as a service
AI is making the knowledge side of consulting cheaper by the day. Teams still avoid the legacy system. The gap is not expertise. It is the structural courage to act on what everyone already knows.
Leadership
Stop letting documentation rot
Five types of documentation, five different AI leverage stories. The question isn’t whether to involve AI in your docs; it’s where each type belongs and how much maintenance you can hand off.
Show me the way: engineering demo 101
Engineering demos fail when they present what was built instead of why it matters. A practical guide to leading with business impact, showing the happy path, and translating technical work into terms your audience actually uses.
The AI skills gap
In 40+ interviews, senior engineers from major banks and consultancies showed strong backgrounds but little real AI fluency. No RAG, no agent frameworks. The gap isn't about skill, it's about exposure.
Your codebase is a commons
Your codebase degrades the same way shared resources do: not from malice, but from missing governance. Elinor Ostrom proved the commons can survive. Her principles map to software teams with uncomfortable precision.
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.
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.
Mental capacity is a bottleneck
AI removes bottlenecks until it reaches the one that doesn’t move: human cognition. The faster AI makes your system, the more your team’s mental capacity becomes the constraint. You can’t add more of it.
Taste is the moat
When AI closes the execution gap, taste becomes the differentiator. Curation, judgement, and the willingness to say “not this” compound over time in ways that models can’t replicate.
The authenticity tax
AI-generated content has made polished writing look suspicious. The deeper cost is the thinking you skip when you outsource the words that define your position.
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.
The SaaS audit bingo card: insights after auditing 180+ SaaS companies
After auditing 180+ SaaS companies, the same patterns keep showing up: a CTO who does everything, documentation nobody updates, a backlog from 2019. Here's what the bingo card looks like, and what AI is changing about it.
Be a lobster
The processes that got you here will eventually constrain you. Like a lobster shedding its shell, scaling companies must periodically dismantle what worked intentionally, not in panic. Constraints aren’t a failure; they’re proof you’ve outgrown your current structure.
Who teaches the next generation?
AI has removed the junior work that used to build software engineers. Seven other industries faced the same disruption and didn't agree on an answer.
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.