writing · 99 essays
Essays on engineering leadership, the agentic SDLC, platform engineering, and enterprise AI — what actually constrains software delivery.
// featured · November 2, 2026
Writing my transition plan showed me what our metrics could not establish: what people had learned, how their judgment had developed, and what my leadership had contributed.
Read essay$ vinny init agentic-sdlc → spinning up reasoning loop ✓ spec generated · 217 lines ✓ tests scaffolded · 14 cases ⚠ coverage gap detected · branch /auth → prompting refinement ✓ branch coverage · 96% // shipping behavior, not just code
An agent that saves you money threatens somebody else's revenue. Amazon, Walmart, the banks, and the card networks are deciding who gets to influence the customer's decision, and better authentication settles only part of that argument.
AI is making some old flaws easier to exploit. Black October exposed the harder problem: delivering a safe fix when both delay and the newest release can put you at risk.
A change can pass release checks after an agent has exceeded its authority. Platforms need controls during execution, with evidence that those controls hold even when the model follows a malicious instruction.
In May I named the argument underneath a year of writing. Five months later, I'd keep the argument and narrow several claims. Here is what changed, what survived, and what I still can't prove.
TypeSafe's Jev gives up prose for typed, probabilistic decisions. The engineering work is defining those decisions, measuring their errors, and deciding when software should ask for help.
I've used five personal agents to help with the work of everyday life. A restaurant call, a changed appointment, and a playoff-ticket search show what I can hand over, what still needs my decision, and how I know the job is finished.
Building a portable software-development workflow across Claude Code, Codex, Goose, Pi and OpenCode.
An agent acting with your credentials can leave a record of your authority without a record of its involvement. Platform teams need to preserve who acted, under whose authority, and how to stop that access.
Every default, error message, and exception communicates how work gets done. The question is whether that's the lesson you intended.
Omarchy installed on a drawer laptop in two minutes and everything worked. The reason is a platform lesson: choose the defaults, keep the escape hatches, and make the system legible to the agent.
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