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14 posts
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…
In April I published one week of SDD production numbers. The same data trail rerun for June 1 through 10 shows the velocity curve: 309 PRs opened, 293 merged, about 185 production deploys, and one footnote about outrunning GitHub Actions…
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.
The previous two posts made claims. Here is what a week of the workflow looks like as a data trail, PRs, deploys, CI runs, specs merged, pulled from GitHub.
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.