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writing · 51 essays
Insights on engineering leadership, technology, and building high-performing teams.
// featured · May 13, 2026
A year of writing, one argument, and a working theory of where software is going
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
Viral prompt threads borrow the language of science without the rigor. Here's a four-question code review for any prompt, plus a worked example that shows the gap between sounding authoritative and being right.
A field report on building Inkwell, a pure-CSS design system that turns taste into repeatable constraints for people, teams, and coding agents.
Code used to be the durable asset. In an agentic SDLC, that changes. Code becomes the regeneratable output of a system that runs on something more important: a clear, versioned, reviewable specification. That shift changes what engineering organizations invest in, how they govern delivery, who they hire, and what they actually ship.
★Jasmine Sun argues AI politics has a new meta, and the warning shots have started. Reading her piece as an engineering leader, here is what the narrative failure looks like from inside a large team, why sociopolitical alignment is our job, and what each of us owes our own career in a market this fast.
★After two greenfield cloud builds in financial services, these are the decisions that aged well, the ones I would redo, and why the small choices in year one decide whether you have a platform or a pile in year five.
A weekend home-networking project became a practical lesson in AI-assisted reasoning, documentation, guardrails, and engineering judgment.
★The strategy posts say AI software development is a system. Here is the working loop I run inside that system: a refined specification, a layer of standards, and a coordinated set of specialists doing the work.
★After thirteen months of daily Claude Code use, I stopped treating AI coding as a prompt discipline problem and started treating it like an engineering system: configurable, layered, observable, and built to learn.
★Anthropic's new design tool does not threaten senior designers. It threatens the apprenticeship that made them senior.
★Every tool in your product development life cycle is now an AI agent trying to do everything. Here is how to stop the chaos, draw the right boundaries, and build an orchestrated pipeline that actually works.
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