Engineering
Judgment Debt: The Hidden Cost of Agentic AI
AI coding agents don't just autocomplete — they plan, delegate, and decide. Most engineers haven't noticed the threshold they already crossed.
May 9, 20267m read
Engineering★ Featured
Frustration Is the Raw Material: The Only Retro Discipline That Matters
Every rule worth keeping came from something going wrong. The durable value of a retro isn't its narratives — it's its imperatives. If your post-mortem doesn't produce rules for next time, you shipped stories.
April 20, 20267m read
Engineering
Grep the Consumers Before Writing the Producer
I specified a dataclass field name in a dispatch prompt. The agent built to spec, then stopped and flagged that the consuming interface expected a different name. The drift was on me, and it only took one grep to prevent.
April 20, 20266m read
Engineering
Parallel AI Agents Need Isolation. I Learned This the Hard Way.
Four agents writing code in the same git checkout. Ten stashes and 45 minutes of recovery later, the rule wasn't the lesson — the announcement that enforces it was.
April 20, 20267m read
Engineering
'Spec Merged' Does Not Mean 'Implementation Queued'
An engineer agent dispatched to wire a module discovered the module didn't exist — only an empty __init__.py. The spec had merged two days earlier. Nobody had queued the build.
April 20, 20266m read
Engineering
The Killed List: Why Aggressive Scope Cuts Are a Scheduling Primitive
A rebuild's timeline is set by what you refuse to rebuild. Three days to ship a greenfield system worked because the cuts were in the requirements document before anyone felt the pressure to reverse them.
April 20, 20266m read
Engineering
Trust Forward: When Agent Rigor Compounds Across Dispatches
An agent caught a latent bug in legacy code the orchestrator's prompt didn't flag. That single act earned weight on their next flag — and that weighted flag caught two more bugs before they shipped. Trust compounds through a chain, not just a single delivery.
April 20, 20267m read
AI★ Featured
Why AI Agents Approve Their Own Bad Work (And How to Fix It)
Anthropic just admitted that Claude approves its own mediocre output. Their fix — borrowed from GANs — separates the agent doing work from the agent judging it. Here's how adversarial evaluation changes everything for agent systems.
March 26, 20268m read
Engineering★ Featured
48 Skills, One Agent, Zero Focus: Building the Egyptian Pantheon AI Team
One AI agent running 48 skills is the same anti-pattern as one engineer doing everything. I split it into 10 specialized agents — named after Egyptian gods — with zero breaking changes to existing infrastructure.
March 2, 20268m read
Engineering★ Featured
Thoth: How I Built an Automated Documentation System That Caught Up 455 PRs in One Night
47 repos. 455 merged PRs. 24 knowledge base docs generated automatically. Documentation doesn't drift when a god of knowledge is watching.
February 28, 20268m read
Engineering
Three PRs. One Morning. The Parallel Agent Pattern That Changes How You Ship
The bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn't writing code faster — it's thinking sequentially when the work isn't. Here's how dispatching three agents simultaneously collapsed three review cycles into one.
February 26, 20267m read
Engineering★ Featured
Mission Control: The Command Center I Built for Managing an Autonomous AI Empire
49 services. 7 agents running 24/7. 54 monitors. One dashboard. Here's how I built the cognitive hub that makes running an autonomous AI ecosystem survivable.
February 25, 20269m read
Engineering
Engineering Leadership in the Agentic Era: What Changes When AI Writes AND Executes
The shift from AI-as-assistant to AI-as-agent isn't just a capability upgrade. It's a fundamental reorganization of how engineering teams are structured, how work flows, and what the engineering manager's job actually is.
February 23, 20267m read