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Systems thinking
How structures behave once they are bigger than any one person can hold in their head: codebases, organizations, the abstractions between them. The same failure shapes keep turning up.
Notes on Systems thinking
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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. -
25 Sep 2026 Systems The Archaeology of Someone Else’s Decisions A legacy product isn’t a mess waiting for good taste. It’s a record of decisions that are mostly still correct, made by people who are gone, for reasons nobody wrote down. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
07 May 2026 Systems The Cost of a Clean Abstraction Every model hides the thing it was built to hide — and that’s exactly where the outage lives. -
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. -
12 Feb 2026 Reliability Predictable Beats Heroic Two years spent making reliability uneventful — and the quiet things that cost.
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.