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Engineering leadership

Notes on running engineering organizations: what holds when the team doubles, what a leader actually owns, and the habits that outlast any one person. Written from the seat, not the stands.

  1. 13 Oct 2026 Reliability The Alarm That Couldn’t Ring Four checks reported healthy while doing nothing. A green light tells you a check has nothing to report, and a broken check has nothing to report either. SystemsLeadership engineering + writing
  2. 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. AIReliability engineering + writing
  3. 07 Sep 2026 Leadership The First Month Isn’t for Being Right A new leader is expected to show impact fast. The actual work in the first month is listening and mapping, not shipping — and the discipline is aiming that patience at yourself, for once, instead of a team you already knew. CultureCoordination engineering + writing
  4. 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. AIStorycraft engineering + writing
  5. 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. AICoordination engineering + writing
  6. 17 Aug 2026 Leadership Silence Is Not a Bandwidth Problem Senior hiring processes ask a lot of a candidate and often give nothing back. The silence isn’t a bandwidth problem — it’s a preview of how a company treats people once it no longer needs anything from them. CulturePeople engineering + writing
  7. 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. AIEngineering engineering + writing
  8. 16 Jul 2026 Leadership The People Who Built It A company let go of the people who built it and called it a new chapter. The org chart forgot them, but everyone still watching learned exactly what their loyalty was worth. CulturePeople engineering + writing
  9. 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. AIPower engineering + writing
  10. 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. AISystems engineering + writing
  11. 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. AIReliability engineering + writing
  12. 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. AISystems engineering + writing
  13. 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. LeadershipSystemsReliability engineering + writing
  14. 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. LeadershipReliabilitySystems engineering + writing
  15. 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. AIReliabilityCoordination engineering
  16. 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. AISystems engineering + writing
  17. 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. AIPsychology engineering + writing
  18. 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. LeadershipReliabilitySystems engineering + writing
  19. 12 Feb 2026 Reliability Predictable Beats Heroic Two years spent making reliability uneventful — and the quiet things that cost. LeadershipSystemsPsychology engineering

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