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Repeat Incidents Are a Leadership Smell
Response and reliability are different games
May 8, 2026·7 min read
The team responded to the incident. Then the same issue hit the next release. Pager coverage worked. Leadership follow-through didn't.
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You're Promoting Confidence, Not Leadership
Presence is easy to score. Multiplication is harder.
May 7, 2026·7 min read
Communication matters. When promotion systems reward confidence without delivery and delegation, you multiply titled performers before you multiply teams.
Most 1:1s Are Career Drift Meetings
Great managers report. Great leaders define the road.
May 6, 2026·7 min read
A high-drive engineer asked what it would take to grow. The gap was map-making, not motivation. Your 1:1 is where you either build that road or quietly train people to drift.
Your Team Is One PTO Away from Missing the Quarter
Hero engineers are a symptom, not a strategy
May 5, 2026·7 min read
If one engineer taking PTO can stall shipping, your problem is not staffing. Your system is carrying critical context in people instead of in the work.
Your Codebase Was Always This Bad
AI didn't create the fragility. It walked into it.
May 2, 2026·3 min read
A team turned on agent mode. Three weeks later, incidents spiked. They were ready to blame the tool. Then their senior traced the bug back to 2019.
We Blamed Stack Overflow for a Decade. Now It's AI.
The tool isn't the problem. The abdication is.
May 1, 2026·6 min read
For 23 years I've watched developers copy code they didn't understand. First from Stack Overflow, now from AI. The pattern never changed. We just changed who we blame.
Your 40-Page Style Guide Isn't a Standard. It's a Wish List.
Why documentation doesn't matter if your AI can't read it
April 30, 2026·3 min read
I was watching the head of architecture demo his team's AI setup when I realized we'd been solving the wrong problem. The style guide wasn't missing. It was invisible.
'AI Wrote It' Is Just the New 'Steve Wrote It'
On blame culture, accountability, and why the author never mattered
April 29, 2026·5 min read
Everyone has worked with a Steve. Now AI is Steve. The lesson isn't about the tool ... it's about what we tolerate.
Most People Use AI Like Google. That's Why It Sucks.
The difference isn't the tool. It's what brain you're pulling from.
April 28, 2026·3 min read
For the first month I treated Copilot like a junior engineer with ambition and no guardrails. It created variables named R and T, broke tests it didn't care about, and left me cleaning up for two hours.
You're Great at Writing Code. That's the Problem.
The skill that made you valuable is becoming table stakes. The new value is orchestration.
April 27, 2026·5 min read
A senior engineer posted on Reddit recently about how it's almost like he's in grief. More than a decade of craft. The things he loved. And now it's all changing.