writing · 74 essays

The archive

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

// featured · August 4, 2026

The Frontier on Your Laptop

Open-weight models have raised the local capability floor while hosted intelligence keeps getting cheaper. The strategic question is no longer which side wins, but which model earns each workload.

Read essay

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

August 3, 202623 min audio
Don't Automate the Apprenticeship Out of Engineering★
Entry-level work was never just cheap execution. It was the training system that produced the people capable of judging what the machines build.
Engineering LeadershipAI StrategyAgentic SDLC
August 1, 202612 min audio
The Modernization Backlog Just Got Repriced★
The rewrite taboo broke for systems that can grade their own replacement. At enterprise scale, the first modernization dollar should fund the answer key, not the port.
Agentic SDLCAI EconomicsEngineering Leadership
July 26, 20267 min
The More AI We Have, the More Human Judgment Matters★
AI is making execution abundant. As intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible, durable organizational advantage shifts toward judgment, context, verification, and leadership.
AI StrategyEngineering LeadershipContext Spine
July 17, 202619 min audio
Everyone Knows You Never Rewrite★
For twenty-six years, the full rewrite was the cardinal sin of software engineering. Then one engineer ported half a million lines of Bun from Zig to Rust in eleven days. The taboo was never about code. It was a price tag, and for systems whose intent lives in an executable oracle, the price just collapsed.
AI EconomicsAI StrategyEngineering Leadership
July 13, 20269 min
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.
AI EconomicsAI StrategyAgentic SDLC
July 6, 202612 min
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.
Agentic SDLCSpec-Driven DevelopmentEngineering Leadership
July 4, 20268 min
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.
AI EconomicsFinOpsClaude Code
July 1, 20269 min
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.
AWSCloudAgentic SDLC
June 28, 202613 min audio
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.
Engineering Leadership
June 26, 202617 min audio
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.
Engineering LeadershipAI CodingSide Projects

featured

The Frontier on Your Laptop

Don't Automate the Apprenticeship Out of Engineering★

The Modernization Backlog Just Got Repriced★

The More AI We Have, the More Human Judgment Matters★

Everyone Knows You Never Rewrite★

Paying for Intelligence Twice★

Two Gates and a Night Shift★

The Instrument and the Ledger★

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

Work Is Hard Enough★

Still in the Code★