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Written when something was learned.

Dated and opinionated. Allowed to be wrong later; a later note says so. Filter by who it is for.

Filtering happens on the page: pieces marked "for both" appear under either audience. Prefer a subject to an audience? Browse by topic →

  • Sep 11, 2026 For companies

    AI writes instant legacy code

    Code written with AI is being thrown away or rewritten within weeks at twice the old rate, and the share of code being refactored is falling. The draft is faster. Owning it is not.

  • Sep 11, 2026 For companies

    Fast food architecture

    AI is a very good drafter and a poor architect. Treating its output as finished engineering is like living on fast food: it works today and costs you later. The fix is a place the reasoning lives that the model can read back.

  • Sep 11, 2026 For companies

    The build is the cheap part

    A tool built in 48 hours feels free until the first API change. The initial build was always the small share of the cost of owning software, and AI just made that share smaller.

  • Sep 11, 2026 For companies

    The tool nobody in IT knows about

    Shadow IT used to be a spreadsheet. Now it is a working app that runs part of the business, built by one person with an AI tool, and that person is the only one who can change it.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    A chatbot for everyone is not an AI strategy

    It is the most common AI decision a company makes, and the most common place it stops. What the licence buys, what it does not, and the four things it quietly leaves undone.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For AI-coders

    Why I put the authorization rule in the database, not the app

    Multi-tenant ticketing with row-level security, and why "you can only see your own company's tickets" belongs below the application code.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For AI-coders

    Make the tool interview you before it builds anything

    The cheapest review happens before the code exists. Three sentences that turn an AI coding tool from an eager builder into a careful interviewer, and when to use them.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For both

    Porting the product, not the platform

    Moving a CRM off a no-code tool means documenting every screen and automation first, then rebuilding the flows the team already knows, not the workarounds the platform forced.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    Seven questions to ask anyone selling you AI

    The vendor has a demo. You need answers. Seven questions that separate an AI feature from an AI liability, and what a good answer sounds like.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For AI-coders

    The AI writes the code fast. Reading it is the job.

    What changed in my day when the typing stopped being the bottleneck, and the three places the time went instead.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For both

    A security pass that runs whether or not anyone remembers

    Scheduled scans, nightly dependency matching, findings as tickets, fixes as reviewed pull requests. The shape of a security practice for a small team that ships with AI.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    The app is the visible part

    Companies that build or buy an AI feature usually stop at the feature. Three invisible parts decide whether it is an asset or a liability, and none of them is optional.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    The coding standard is a file the tool reads

    Three people building with AI produce three different codebases unless the standard lives somewhere the tool reads it every time. Not a wiki page. A file in the repo.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    The employee who can now build apps

    Someone in your company who is not an engineer has built something the business now relies on. It is an opportunity and the biggest new risk in most small firms. What to require before you rely on it.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For AI-coders

    Three design directions in an evening, and why the client picked the one I did not expect

    A method for getting a real design choice out of a non-designer: stable option names, an honest tradeoff on each, and a fresh-eyes critic pass before anyone sees it.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For both

    An intake step that asks two questions before a human reads the ticket

    Using a model to clarify vague support requests against a map of the client's systems, with a person still approving every ticket.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    What a company keeps when the coder leaves

    Git keeps the code. It does not keep the reasoning, the gotcha that cost a day, or why the last approach was abandoned. That is a different kind of backup, and most companies do not have it.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For both

    Where the rule lives

    "You can only see your own company's tickets" is one sentence. Where a team chooses to enforce it decides whether the next feature can forget it. A story about moving a rule below the code, told for people who will never write a database policy.

  • Sep 5, 2026 For companies

    Your staff already have an AI plan. You just have not read it.

    In most companies without a policy, AI is already in daily use on whatever data is to hand. That is not a discipline problem. It is the plan you get by not writing one.