A comment is for a different reader
The tool had comments on under ten per cent of its lines and ninety pages of documentation built into the binary, and I'd argue that was one decision made for two very different readers.
Tags
16 pages
Leadership
Nobody photographs the scaffolding
My R&D team's work only ever showed up in other people's numbers, so when delivery became the measure, they went. Making that work visible was my job.
The tech debt you can't fix alone
The engineering argument for paying down tech debt almost never won. What got it funded was a promise, and it tended to be my name on the promise.
Blameless doesn't mean nobody messed up
Blameless was meant to make it safe to tell the truth. Somewhere along the way it started to mean nobody did anything, and I'd quite like the first one back.
Fourteen projects, one head
Agents made the doing cheap. What fourteen sessions cost is walking into each one cold, and the one head doing the walking.
Which tests would you cut when the bill arrives?
The runner fleet cost $270 I didn't have, so it went off. The tests stayed on, and the savings came from everything I'd been paying for twice.
What happens when an AI burns out
A Claude session ran for two days, stopped listening and got my hand-written code backwards. So I took it off the job, and asked for a proper handover first.
Management was never a promotion
Management and engineering are two sides of the same coin, and far too many companies forget the engineering side has no cap.
A terrible lead to an AI junior
I'd built this exact thing by hand, years ago, pixel perfect. So why was I sitting here shouting at a screen while a machine got it wrong three times?
A Slack channel with nobody in it
I asked nine agent sessions to stop compiling for forty minutes. What came back read like a team of colleagues, and I haven't worked out what to do about that.
