writing · 69 essays

The archive

Essays on engineering leadership, the agentic SDLC, platform engineering, and enterprise AI — what actually constrains software delivery.

// featured · July 13, 2026

Paying for Intelligence Twice

Satya Nadella named a real problem: AI workflows generate valuable learning exhaust from proprietary context and corrections. He is right about the asset. My practitioner's edit is simple: own the learning loop, not necessarily the model.

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agentic-sdlc

$ 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

July 6, 2026#agentic-sdlc

Two Gates and a Night Shift

My personal delivery pipeline runs on three Claude agents, three nested loops, and two explicit human approval gates. The gates sit where judgment is cheapest and most consequential, and the real bottleneck moved upstream to the clarity of the ask.

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July 4, 2026#ai-economics

The Instrument and the Ledger

In June I itemized the AI subsidy by hand. This month I built the instrument that does it for me. It took an afternoon, and it was built by the very thing it measures.

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July 1, 2026#aws

Barometer: I Chased a New Primitive. I Was Standing on It.

I built a serverless internet health monitor because I wanted an excuse to learn Lambda MicroVMs. The better lesson was that Barometer did not need the newest primitive. It needed the boring, correct fit between the tool and the job.

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June 28, 2026#engineering-leadership

Work Is Hard Enough

Work is already hard. Leadership should remove the avoidable human drag: unclear decisions, unsafe disagreement, personal friction, and cultures where telling the truth costs too much.

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June 26, 2026#engineering-leadership

Still in the Code

I lead engineering at a Fortune 100 company, and I still ship my own software. Not because leaders need to prove they can code, but because AI is changing the work faster than secondhand models can keep up.

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June 22, 2026#engineering-leadership

Complexity Is Inevitable. Drag Is Optional.

Complexity is inevitable in modern engineering. Drag is optional. The work of leadership is turning repeated friction into platforms, defaults, and systems that help teams move faster with trust intact.

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June 18, 2026#ios

Native Was the Long Way Around. The Stack Wasn't the Point.

I rebuilt a working web app as native iOS and Mac software, not because native was magic, but because the discipline required to make it correct is the same discipline AI agents need to be useful.

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June 15, 2026#ai-economics

The Subsidy, Itemized

Twenty-six days of Claude Code showed $2,556 of API-priced work against a $200 subscription. The lesson was not the total. It was cache behavior, model routing, and a government kill switch that landed in my usage chart. Value lives in verified outcomes, not tokens, and the work has to survive the stop.

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June 14, 2026#agentic-sdlc

Trust the Gate, Not the Actor

AI has made generation cheap. The durable advantage now belongs to teams that can encode judgment into gates that verify whether the work should ship.

June 13, 2026#ai-strategy

The Kill Switch Was Always There

A government order took Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline. The lesson for enterprise AI is architecture: portability gets you out, verification gets you out safely.

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