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17 posts
Fourth lesson in a series on running an AI-powered software team of one. A session pointed at one repository commits there and nowhere else, so a project that lives in one folder cannot be delegated safely. Split it into one home per sta…
Third lesson in a series on running an AI-powered software team of one. A rule you write in a README gets broken by the first session that never reads it. A folder of one-script checks, run by git before every push, turns your most-repea…
Second lesson in a series on running an AI-powered software team of one. A fresh agent session cannot see what you rejected, so it proposes it again. One page per settled choice, an index, and one standing line make every session read yo…
The third post in the SDD numbers series is not about velocity. Since June the platform's effort moved into four quiet systems: an externalized memory, a statistical screen that refuses to flatter me, a point-in-time data floor, and a pr…
The full path to an agent platform that edits its own instructions is already published, scattered across seven articles that never mention each other. I run that architecture as one person: supervisor and worker tiers, verification guar…
First lesson in a series on running an AI-powered software team of one. Before you ask an agent to build, give your project a home for intent: a small directory of numbered specs grown from one template your agent fills in and you approv…
SpecSelf looks like a set of features: coherence checks, persona rotation, review cadences, an audit trail. Every one of them was implied by ten frontmatter fields decided on day one. A life-OS is not a feature list. It is a schema decis…
I built a method as a public repo and the product that runs it as two private ones, and none of them treated the others as a source of truth. The domain enum lived in four places. A persona drifted between its lens file and its API contr…
Three months ago I laid out spec-driven development and the folder architecture that makes it work. Most of the playbook held up in daily production use. Three ideas that essay never mentioned turned out to matter more than anything in i…
In one working session I designed a read-only advisor and spent the rest of it being the customer of another. Both ran on the same short discipline: surface the decision and never seize it, verify before you assert, pilot before you fan…
A team holds its hard-won knowledge across many heads. A solo operator holds it in one, and that one forgets. The fix is to externalize memory into structured records the tools read by default, so the system remembers what the person can…
The most dangerous result is the one you want to be true. Your own review is compromised by the same motivation that produced the finding, so the fix is a standing skeptic whose job is to refute, not confirm, before you act on anything.
The instinct with agentic tooling is to add: more agents, more skills, more clever prompts. The leverage runs the other way. Here is the test I use to decide whether a piece of work should be a script, a hook, a skill, or an agent, and w…
Boris Cherny mapped five execution archetypes on the Claude Code team, and noted they cut across job titles. His framework describes a team dividing labor across people. Run a fleet alone and the same five split a different way: across y…
Why good validation reports every problem at once instead of failing on the first one, and how to build the accumulator, phasing, and structured errors that make it work.
Why spec-driven development and structured folder architecture are the missing infrastructure for AI-assisted engineering: methodology, common mistakes, and where to start.
A practitioner's review of Doug Kerwin's Enterprise Vibe Coding Playbook, why AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement, is the framework enterprise engineering teams need.