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.
The Pass: Agentic Engineering
You are no longer the line cook. You are the executive chef at the pass, directing agents who compile, test, and retry at high speed. You may not type a single line of code, but you remain accountable for all of it. Your value shifts from labor to leadership.
The Value of Frustration: Your Untapped Guide to Improvement
Frustration isn't just a roadblock—it's an untapped metric for improvement. It often serves as the sole indicator of issues in complex systems. By practicing monitoring and employing second-order thinking, you can transform this emotion into a metric for personal and organizational betterment.
Doctests for Ocaml
You can test in the small, validate the code in your documentation, encourage testing, and get better documentation by leveraging MDX, a doctest-like tool for OCaml.
Coding is a bad habit
Don't fall back on your engineering skills when you face challenges. You can't code your way out of organizational issues.
Magic in the Mundane: Compounding Interest For Organizations
There is magic in mundane processes applied with discipline. Use RCAs and processes to massively improve your world.
Productivity Plow, Clear a Path to Success
Organizations build out teams around 'Engineering Productivity.' It takes fundamental changes to the organization's structure and a management to improve productivity.
