writing · 47 essays

The archive

Insights on engineering leadership, technology, and building high-performing teams.

// featured · May 10, 2026

AI Populism is a Builder's Problem

Jasmine Sun argues AI politics has a new meta, and the warning shots have started. Reading her piece as an engineering leader, here is what the narrative failure looks like from inside a large team, why sociopolitical alignment is our job, and what each of us owes our own career in a market this fast.

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agentic-sdlc

$ vinny init agentic-sdlc
→ spinning up reasoning loop
✓ spec generated · 217 lines
✓ tests scaffolded · 14 cases
⚠ coverage gap detected · branch /auth
→ prompting refinement
✓ branch coverage · 96%
// shipping behavior, not just code

May 8, 2026#cloud-strategy

Building Cloud From Zero: Five Decisions That Compounded and Three I’d Redo

After two greenfield cloud builds in financial services, these are the decisions that aged well, the ones I would redo, and why the small choices in year one decide whether you have a platform or a pile in year five.

May 6, 2026#ai-strategy

AI Did Not Configure My Network. It Helped Me Understand It.

A weekend home-networking project became a practical lesson in AI-assisted reasoning, documentation, guardrails, and engineering judgment.

★

April 30, 2026#ai-coding

Spec, Standards, Specialists: How I Actually Build with AI

The strategy posts say AI software development is a system. Here is the working loop I run inside that system: a refined specification, a layer of standards, and a coordinated set of specialists doing the work.

★

April 25, 2026#ai-coding

Claude Code Is a Build System, Not a Chatbot

After thirteen months of daily Claude Code use, I stopped treating AI coding as a prompt discipline problem and started treating it like an engineering system: configurable, layered, observable, and built to learn.

★

April 18, 2026#ai-strategy

I Built a Design System in Two Hours. Figma, We Should Talk.

Anthropic's new design tool does not threaten senior designers. It threatens the apprenticeship that made them senior.

★

April 15, 2026#ai-strategy

The Agentic SDLC: Uniting the AI Tool Sprawl

Every tool in your product development life cycle is now an AI agent trying to do everything. Here is how to stop the chaos, draw the right boundaries, and build an orchestrated pipeline that actually works.

★

April 12, 2026#claude-code

Eleven Years, One Week, and an AI Co-Pilot: Rebuilding TravelTimes for iOS 26.4

A decade-old side project, six major features, one week. How spec-driven AI-assisted development compressed months of work into a focused sprint on a real codebase with real constraints — and where the AI got it wrong.

★

April 5, 2026#GenAI

The Dark Factory Model for AI-Driven Software Development

Most engineers treat AI-generated code like work from a junior developer they don't trust. Simon Willison gave me a better mental model: the dark factory. Here is what it means, why experience is the raw material, and how to build a system that runs.

★

April 4, 2026#GenAI

Open Weights, Real Stakes: Running Gemma 4 31B Locally

Google dropped Gemma 4, and I had it running locally the same night. What open weights actually mean, the hardware reality, and why the most interesting AI architectures are about to go hybrid — on-device and in the cloud.

★

March 28, 2026#claude-code

From Copy-Paste to Skill: What Thousands of AI Coding Sessions Taught Me About Guardrails

After thousands of sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Kiro, and every other LLM-based CLI and IDE, I distilled what I learned into a reusable Claude Skill. Here's how those lessons became the guardrails that let me move faster and actually trust the output.

★

AI Populism is a Builder's Problem

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$ vinny init agentic-sdlc → spinning up reasoning loop ✓ spec generated · 217 lines ✓ tests scaffolded · 14 cases ⚠ coverage gap detected · branch /auth → prompting refinement ✓ branch coverage · 96% // shipping behavior, not just code