Strong types
I don't need to argue for types anymore. I need to argue that, with LLMs writing code, types are the contract that tells you whether the work is safe.
Writings
I am current migrating old writings and blog posts to a single place. More will be backfilled soon.
Don't Embarrass Yourself
The question I ask before I ship is really a premortem. What could go wrong, and could I live with it? Most of the time the answer lets me ship faster, not slower.
Dogfood your own work
A bug report tells you what broke. Using your own product tells you what's wrong. What running the production build of Lotl every day, on more than one machine, taught me about that.
Ubiquitous Language Was a Nice-to-Have. Agents Made It a Requirement.
A shared team glossary used to be a nice-to-have. Agents read your words literally—so ambiguous vocabulary now ships as confidently wrong code, and a glossary became the cheapest way to stop it.
A Forensic Analysis of LLM Math Errors: What ChatGPT Got Wrong in 2023
Dissecting the structural engineering conversations that led to bent steel poles.
Don't Leave Ash Behind—On Staff Archetypes and the Work Nobody Sees
Have you stayed anywhere for a while? An interviewer asked me that once. It stung—because I knew what they were really asking.
Cognitive RAM, Two Years Later
Two years ago I started treating documentation as cognitive RAM for a stateless AI. The core insight held — but everything around it evolved.
We Stopped the Bleeding (But Didn't Cure the Disease)
An honest postmortem about debugging a Kafka pipeline nobody fully understood, and the gap between stabilization and cure.
Cognitive RAM: How I Learned to Work with a Stateless AI
ChatGPT has no memory. That's not a bug — it's the engineering constraint you design around. Here's what I started doing about it.
LLMs Need Supervision, Not Worship
The AI productivity gap isn't primarily a prompting problem. It's a code review problem.
How ChatGPT Helped Me Bend Steel Poles
I asked ChatGPT to help me engineer a backyard ninja course. It gave me six different answers to the same question — from 44 lbs to 51,857 lbs. I picked the wrong ones. The poles bent.
Cultivating a High Performance Engineering Team
Eight goals a company should aspire towards to unlock their engineering team.