Summary: a personal experience on how AI helped complete a non-trivial programming tasks. A difficult task This month I spent a whole week working on a really difficult algorithmic problem, made more difficult by complicated business rules, which I wasn’t able to get the client to agree to simplify. The problem was an API endpoint […]
I still care about the code
Ever since AI coding assistance started gaining traction I’ve heard people say, “Oh, so at some point we might not even have to care about the code anymore, it’s like Assembly, we certainly don’t look at THAT anymore.” Recently, with enhanced agentic capabilities and the coinage of “vibe coding” there has been a new spike […]
How far can we push AI autonomy in code generation?
When people ask about the future of Generative AI in coding, what they often want to know is: Will there be a point where Large Language Models can autonomously generate and maintain a working software application? Will we be able to just author a natural language specification, hit “generate” and walk away, and AI will […]
Three worthwhile articles yesterday
Three articles I enjoyed yesterday: Stephen O’Grady talks about how Gen AI tools break two common constants with developer tools: they are willing to flit between Gen AI tools and they are willing to pay for them. This implies that it’s not too late for new tools to appear, and that enterprise adoption will be […]
The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence
Impact Intelligence is the title of my latest book. It explains how to improve awareness of the business impact of new initiatives. The Classic Enterprise thinks of the expenditure on these initiatives as discretionary spend. A software business might account for it as R&D expenditure. Written with a framing of investment governance, the book is […]
The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence
Impact Intelligence is the title of my latest book. It explains how to improve awareness of the business impact of new initiatives. The Classic Enterprise thinks of the expenditure on these initiatives as discretionary spend. A software business might account for it as R&D expenditure. Written with a framing of investment governance, the book is […]
Quick but worthwhile links
Abi Noda observes Just met with a 2000+ eng company. Their developers are saving 2+ hours per week thanks to Copilot. But they’re also losing: 3 hrs per week due to slow builds 4 hrs per week on dev environment toil 2 hrs per week waiting for code reviews AI is not a silver bullet. […]
The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence
Impact Intelligence is the title of my latest book. It explains how to improve awareness of the business impact of new initiatives. The Classic Enterprise thinks of the expenditure on these initiatives as discretionary spend. A software business might account for it as R&D expenditure. Written with a framing of investment governance, the book is […]
Team OKRs in Action
OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—have become a popular goal-setting framework in tech and beyond. They were designed to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, promising focus, alignment, and accountability. But too often, they’ve turned into something else entirely: a quarterly ritual of checklists, dashboards, and performance metrics that smother the original intent. I’ve seen it […]
Expansion Joints
Back in the days when I did live talks, one of my abilities was to finish on time, even if my talk time was cut at the last moment (perhaps due to the prior speaker running over). The key to my ability to do this was to use Expansion Joints – parts of the talk […]
