The Mastery Gap
What the Industrial Revolution Tells Us About the Junior Engineer Crisis
The anxiety running through engineering right now has a
The Cockpit Has to Change Too
We optimized our work environment for humans writing code. Now we need to optimize for humans orchestrating agents. Monitors, voice tools, PR queues, the boring infrastructure nobody's talking about. That's how you know we're early.
The Junior Engineer Paradox
Engineering capability was earned through friction. You wrestled with syntax. You paged at 2 a.m. You learned why certain patterns were bad because you lived inside their failure modes. That friction is gone. But the struggle isn't. It's simply moving up the stack.
What AI-Powered Development Requires from Leadership
In the agentic era, execution is cheap but decision latency kills velocity. The solution isn't more coordination—it's architectural strategy with enough logic density that engineers can make good calls independently. Duplication beats meetings. Build the framework before you unleash the agents.
GenAI Product Doctrine: Products of Counsel
Products of Counsel advise humans toward outcomes, not just answers. The moat isn't chat UI or data access—it's accumulated user context, domain judgment, and encoded expertise. Sycophancy and false confidence kill trust. Win by being worth believing, not by being liked.
GenAI Product Doctrine: Products of Judgement
Products of Judgment feed Products of Consequence. If your output is derived, not retrieved, the doctrine applies: confidence as first-class output, structured uncertainty, reasoning legible enough to investigate. Agents can't muddle. Make your signal good enough to act on.
GenAI Product Doctrine: Products of Consequence
This guide is for teams adding agentive capabilities to existing products. Often, when people think about adding 'AI'
A Product Taxonomy for the Agentive Age
We're entering a new era. The old product rules don't apply.
Software is reorganizing around agents
The Dawning of the Age of the Arbiter
Organizational distance, layers between intent and execution, drove specialization for decades. AI agents collapse that distance, letting one engineer direct many without translation loss. The human role shifts from doer to arbiter: steering, judging, staying close to the craft.
The Coming PR Tsunami
LLMs broke the code production bottleneck, and now review is the constraint. The fix: small atomic PRs, LLM-generated summaries that compress comprehension time, and engineer-owned calibration. Teams that adapt stay ahead. Teams that wait drown in their own queues.
