Local Genius, Collective Drag: AI Tooling at Scale
I was discussing with some old friends recently about on call not specific incidents, more how to shap the burden across a large team. Someone mentioned in their company a few engi...
Posts
Practical conversations about what AI changes for engineering leadership and management.
AI Fluency: The New Non-Negotiable in Hiring
I have been talking to people in my network lately hiring managers, staff engineers, a few founders and a phrase keeps surfacing in different words but with the same spine: if some...
AI Spend Volatility: What Changed in Pricing, and What Leaders Can Control
Engineering organizations are hitting a planning wall that spreadsheets were not built for. Headcount curves are familiar: slow ramps, predictable bands, and finance models that mo...
When the Minimum Span Arrived Faster Than I Expected
I was in a leadership forum this week when the conversation turned to span of control. Not in the abstract. In numbers. There is a new floor forming: a minimum expectation that man...
From Story Points to Decision Throughput
I was in planning recently when someone asked, "How many points can we commit to next sprint?" For years, that question was normal. Useful, even. It gave us a shared language for f...
From Reporting Grind to Leadership Time: My AI Workflow Evolution
A few weeks ago, I had one of those leadership moments that felt productive on paper and pointless in reality. I had spent over an hour stitching together Jira updates, GitHub acti...
Performance Reviews in the Age of AI
As Engineering Managers, we’ve always known that impact beats throughput. The best leaders in our industry already look past the raw volume of PRs or the velocity of a sprint to fi...
The 1:50 Ratio: Is the "Pod" Dead and the "Horde" Rising
The 1:50 Ratio: Is the "Pod" Dead and the "Horde" Rising? For decades, the "Rule of 7" (plus or minus two) has been the gold standard for engineering management. The logic was simp...
When AI Feels Like Extra Work
I had a realization this week: I barely opened my LLM this week, and for the first time in months, I felt like I was falling behind. In the past few months I have been surrounded b...
Playing a Chess Simul: Are AI Agents Exhausting Our Best People?
We were promised that AI would be the "Easy Button" for engineering. Instead, I’m seeing something else: my highest performing leads and managers are reporting a level of fatigue t...
