The Source Is Not the Idea
You read an argument that would have moved you, but the person making it is wrong about something else, and you find yourself unable to take it seriously. You haven't evaluated it. You've evaluated the source. This happens to you constantly, and you mostly do not notice.
Agents Are Not Accountable
The agent cannot be paged. You can. Agents unbundled authorship from accountability, and the part of authorship that mattered was never the keystrokes. It was the reading. It was the willingness to defend what shipped under your name. That part needs a name now. Call it self-review.
The Agentic Transition Playbook
Practices that were nice-to-have for humans become load-bearing for agents. Most organizations won't fail at agentic development. They'll buy licenses, get some wins, and plateau. The playbook for the next plateau: four layers, a method, and the human work that decides whether any of it lands.
The Flood Moves Upstream
Six months ago I wrote that a flood was coming. It's here. We tripled deployment rate in one month. Stakeholders can't produce enough work for us. We built an unbelievably powerful engine that isn't connected to the wheels. Transform the rest of the business, or accept the plateau.
Agents Reprice Everything
We run three backend languages. That was never a goal — it's what happens when pragmatic choices accumulate over
The Hoist
Most people building with AI are still the orchestrator — the thing holding their own tools together. The hoist is the moment you realize those tools aren't for you. They're for an agent. Stop being the agent. Become the arbiter.
Discipline Is the Point
The prevailing narrative goes something like this: agents are getting better, fast. Soon they'll plan, execute, test, and
Code Used to Be a Moat
The economic protection of software was always reproduction cost. AI collapses that cost. Any business whose moat depended on software being expensive to reproduce is now structurally exposed.
The Typewriter Defense
Atlassian won’t vanish overnight—but inertia isn’t a moat. In an agentic world where software is cheap and specs replace tickets, workflow tools built for human task tracking face structural risk. The need for coordination remains. The shape of it doesn’t.
The Agentive Product Stack: How the Layers Compose
The taxonomy describes roles. Products of Consequence, Judgment, Counsel, Action. Four categories, four different jobs.
But products don't
