Ideas
Essays on leading engineering teams and on how AI changes the work.
Across three teams and about 25 people, six engineers were promoted and one left. How I hire for character in a casual interview, pair every engineer with a mentor and a mentee, and make the case for their promotions.
AI reached every stage of how we built software, and feature output barely moved. It sped up coding without speeding up the system around it. The real limit is the AI trust bottleneck, and here is how a team measures its way through it.
I have built four AI systems, and in every one the hard part was not the model. It was the management. Six habits from managing people that carry over to managing agents.
Most companies treat innovation sprints as a reward. The best ones treat them as a system. Here’s what the best version looks like, why guardrails kill it, and why the ROI shows up two quarters later.