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Journal · Topic · 15 notes
AI in engineering teams
What changes when a model joins the team, and what stays stubbornly human. Review gates, judgment, accountability, and the apprenticeship that cheap output puts at risk.
Notes on AI in engineering teams
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15 Sep 2026 Leadership The Slot Machine With Better Graphics AI made failing free. It did nothing for learning, and the two were never the same thing — "fail fast" only ever worked because the fast was in service of the learning, not a virtue on its own. -
24 Aug 2026 Leadership The Bottleneck Was Never the Building AI made the first draft of an idea nearly free, in fiction and in product. It didn’t solve the actual bottleneck. It just made it impossible to hide: staying with an idea through the unglamorous middle, after the excitement is gone and before it’s any good. -
18 Aug 2026 Leadership Nobody Sent Out the New Rulebook AI let candidates apply at volume and let recruiters screen at volume, and the arms race between the two is making hiring faster and less honest at the same time. Nobody actually agreed to this. -
24 Jul 2026 Leadership AI Doesn't Create the Problem. It Reveals It. AI coding tools don’t create org design problems — they make the existing ones impossible to ignore. The orgs that benefit most already sorted decision rights, review ownership, and escalation before the rollout. -
10 Jul 2026 Leadership The Conscience in the Room Capability used to be the hard part of leadership. Now it’s cheap and everywhere, and the scarce thing is the person willing to ask what it costs — and who pays. -
10 Jul 2026 Leadership The Role Everyone Is Cutting When AI made building cheap, companies started thinning out both their product and project managers. They optimised the constraint that just disappeared, and left the two that replaced it unowned. -
03 Jul 2026 Leadership Accountability Was Never the Computer’s Job When something an AI helped build goes wrong, the tool makes an easy scapegoat. It cannot hold the blame — and pretending it can is how teams stop learning. -
26 Jun 2026 Leadership The Apprenticeship We’re Automating Away The grunt work wasn’t a tax on getting started. It was how people became engineers who understood the system. AI just removed it. -
19 Jun 2026 AI The Cheapest Code Is the One You Never Write AI made building almost free. It left the cost of owning what you build exactly where it was. -
15 Jun 2026 AI AI Is About to Make Engineering Discipline Mainstream For a decade, rigor was a luxury only the best teams could justify. AI just made it the price of admission. -
13 Jun 2026 Leadership Confidence Is Not Competence AI gives a functional expert the power to ship and the confidence to do it. It can’t give them the years that teach you what code does when no one is watching. -
11 Jun 2026 Leadership You Can’t Lead What You’ve Stopped Understanding An agent writes the first draft of almost everything now — which is exactly why I still build every day. -
29 May 2026 Leadership Leading People Who Trust the Machine The hardest part of an AI-first team isn’t the AI — it’s the judgment it quietly offers to replace. -
21 Apr 2026 AI AI Amplifies Discipline, It Doesn’t Replace It The 25% velocity gain came from the gates we kept, not the tools we adopted. -
09 Mar 2026 Storycraft Why I Write the Curse Instead of the Cure Four novels, three universes, and the one fear that keeps surfacing: capability arriving before conscience.
From the desk
Keep the argument going?
This desk is where the engineering and the fiction argue it out. If a line here stuck with you — or you’d take the other side — I’d genuinely like to hear it.