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All Reads

Links typically sourced from Hacker News, TLDR.tech, or Software Lead Weekly

Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

Read on July 25, 2026

I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before you commit, etc. For a while I thought the people repeating these lines were behind. Then we introduced LLMs in my org and the cost of producing code dropped, and I started checking each rule against the assumption underneath it. T

My note

The first job in an AI adopting org is instrumentation being honest enough to tell you whether you have accelerated at all.

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Why I'm (sort of) not worried about AI

Read on July 17, 2026

As a creator, and as a leader of a tech company, I have a deep sense of conflict about AI. I feel outrage, but I also feel something else. On social media, though, only the pure outrage floats to the top of our feeds. The truth is that there’s a gap between the unqualified fury I see externally, and the full complexity of my own, internal feelings. I haven’t seen this friction captured or articulated anywhere yet, and I feel a sort of desperate pressure to explain it — not just to you all, but to myself. After months of trying to structure my thoughts, this talk was the result.

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The hidden cost of AI-assisted development: cognitive fatigue

Read on July 12, 2026

After three months of AI-assisted development, I’m more productive than ever. I’m also mentally exhausted in ways I didn’t expect. The productivity gains are real—I can go from sketch to working prototype in hours instead of days. But there’s a hidden cost that we’re not talking about: the tools fundamentally change the cognitive load of programming. Instead of being tired from wrestling with implementation details, I’m exhausted from operating constantly at the architecture and design level.

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COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History

Read on July 6, 2026

I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000 words daily. What does their obsessive output reveal about the nature of writing itself? The volume isn't the point. The showing up is.

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Who Does What? Team Topologies for the Agentic Platform

Read on June 23, 2026

The agentic platform defines what needs to be provided. Team Topologies defines who provides it, and how teams interact to make it happen. In the first article of this series, we asked the what: which systemic capabilities (context, guardrails, tooling) are needed to produce reliable applications at scale. The answer was the agentic platform, and at its core, the agentic factory: the mechanism where agents plan, code, test, and ship. But a platform does not build itself, and more importantly, it is not consumed the same way it is built. A fundamental question remains: who does what?

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Agent responsibly - Vercel

Read on April 4, 2026

There's a difference between leveraging AI and relying on it. A framework for shipping agent-generated code with the judgment and guardrails it requires.

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Production Is Where the Rigor Goes

Read on March 21, 2026

In early February, Martin Fowler and the good folks at Thoughtworks sponsored a small, invite-only unconference in Deer Valley, Utah—birthplace of the Agile Manifesto—to talk about how software engineering is changing in the AI-native era. The longer I sit with this recap, the more troubled I am by what it doesn't say. I worry that the most respected minds in software are unintentionally replicating a serious blind spot that has haunted software engineering for decades: relegating production to the realm of bugs and incidents.

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Welcome to the Room

Read on February 8, 2026

A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella When I was Promoted to Technical Fellow, I was “invited to the room”, joining Microsoft’s other Senior Executives.  It was really something. Achieving t…

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POSSE

Read on January 3, 2026

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

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Your URL Is Your State

Read on November 3, 2025

A deep dive into how thoughtful URL design can enhance usability, shareability, and performance. Learn what state belongs in URLs, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical patterns for modern web apps.

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Vibe engineering

Read on October 8, 2025

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to …

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Communication is The Job

Read on August 23, 2025

We cannot help but communicate and our failure to embrace that reality can leave our teams in a state of information insecurity. Instead, we need to own our responsibility and be proactive.

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Closure | Tech Debt? I don't believe it exists.

Read on August 13, 2025

Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist. There’s endless discourse around tech debt. Kellan has some really good categorizations of different types, Will Larson has a great explainer of organization debt in his book, and I also like the idea of product debt. Throughout my career, I’ve been an engineer complaining about tech debt, a manager prioritizing (and deprioritizing) addressing tech debt, and a product manager, where I assume I primarily inspire the creation of new tech debt.

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6 Weeks of Claude Code - Puzzmo Blog

Read on August 3, 2025

It is wild to think that it has been only a handful of weeks. Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful.

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How I build software quickly

Read on July 14, 2025

Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small changes. Practice specific skills.

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