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Essays on the systems, frameworks, and human dynamics that make — or break — product delivery at scale. (scroll for more)
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Agents did not make delivery unpredictable. They made your forecasting method visible. Point estimates and velocity assume a stable mean, and agentic work has a fat right tail. Here is why variance now dominates the plan, and the throughput, percentile, and Monte Carlo model that replaces story points.
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Agents made writing code cheap, but proving it still needs somewhere to run. Environment provisioning and test data have quietly become the binding constraint on agentic delivery. Here is why shared pre-prod collapses under parallel agents, plus the environment tiers, test data strategy, and metrics that fix it.
The largest security decision your team made this quarter was probably an import line an AI agent wrote in milliseconds. This post shows delivery leaders how software supply chain risk changed when agents started choosing dependencies, and how to turn dependency provenance into a release gate your pipeline enforces.
My new book, Ace of Something: The Advantage of Being a Master of None, is out in paperback and on Kindle. It is a career memoir and a field guide for the person who was never the best at any one thing and ended up at the center of the work anyway.
For twenty years the PRD was a document humans read and interpreted. Now an AI agent reads it and ships. This post shows delivery leaders why product requirements must become an executable spec, and what changes when ambiguity turns into production risk.
How InvestmentThing works: a Claude strategist that proposes, a deterministic risk engine that overrules it, two brokers pretending to be one account, a second model that tunes the dials, and every expensive mistake I made getting there.
A practical walkthrough of building a systems atlas: the seven questions it has to answer, evidence based discovery instead of surveys, the schema that is the actual product, ownership as a social problem, decision records with a revisit condition, an interface where the relationships are the navigation, and the freshness protocol that keeps the whole thing alive after you stop looking at it.
Agentic AI is automating the base of the engineering pyramid, the junior work that teams were built on. That does not shrink your team evenly, it inverts it, pushing demand toward senior reviewers and architects while entry level roles collapse. Here is how to staff for the inversion without starving your own pipeline.
