Tag
#engineering-leadership
Four Levels, Three Cliffs
Teams do not adopt AI. They climb four levels, and each step moves the context and the blast radius somewhere new. Most companies stand on three levels at once.
The Model Grades Its Own Homework
Sorting changes by risk is the right idea. Letting the agent's confidence set the class is the one input that turns every gate behind it into decoration.
Nobody Resisted
We planned for skeptics and got 1,372 skill files in eleven weeks. Notes on an AI adoption that went too well.
Every Approval Is a Missing Rule
If the architects do not write the rules the agents read, the person who writes the template does. Notes from reviewing an operating model for agentic delivery.
Turn the Sequence Diagram on Its Side
The people who can tell you a boundary is wrong were never going to read UML. Turn the sequence diagram on its side and they do not have to.
We Deleted the Wrong Half of Agile
Reviewability is something you design. Extreme Programming already knew how, and we made exactly the wrong half of it optional.
Design the Stopping Point
Target state is the easy half of a solution design. The hard half is the first step, because that is usually where the money runs out.
Count Your Rejections
A friend passed every round and still did not get the job. Nothing was wrong with him. The company simply had no seat that quarter.
Adoption Is the Deliverable
The ugliest service in production beats the most elegant one nobody calls. So where exactly does an architect's job end?
The Bottleneck Moved
AI made writing code cheap. Our squad reports show where the queue went next: to the people who have to read it.
Mathematicians vs. Lawyers
Two thinking archetypes I keep meeting in architecture rooms, and why your system needs both.
Pricing the Invisible
Your best architecture work produces nothing observable. Backlogs only rank observables. Let's fix the mismatch.
Prompt-Driven Architecture
Part three of the "tools that scale" series: what happens when the daily practice of a Solution Architect starts running on AI.
Probabilistic Metrics
Why the most useful numbers in our AI transformation were never in a database.
From Signals to Blips
How a tech radar became my favorite tool for driving an AI transformation across several hundred developers.
Grinding Dijkstra at Senior Level
Twelve years into my career, there's a repo on my disk where I practice graph traversals like a student. Here's why that's not humiliating.
Questions Are an Architect's Sharpest Tool
The artifact of mine that pays off most is not a diagram and not a decision record. It's a list of questions.
The Migration That Never Starts
Every organization has one. Yours does too. It has a folder, a deck, and a birthday.
Nobody Owns the Sum
Every squad owns its piece. The customer buys the whole. Guess which one has no owner.
Decisions Have an Architecture Too
We design our systems obsessively, then let the decisions about them happen by loudest voice.
Data-Driven Theater
Everyone wants decisions backed by data. Almost nobody asks what the data went through to get there.