AI
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Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software Factory
→: Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software FactoryI’m not someone who gets called when things are going well. So when Michelle – the Twill CEO – called me in December, it was because she needed some help with engineering. In 18 months of being an advisor, this was the first time it was a phone call and not an email. There were…
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Judgement > Output
→: Judgement > OutputThe benefit of conference season is talking to a lot of people (the downside: needing antibiotics), and of course many of those conversations came to AI, explicitly or not. But underneath the obvious shift there’s an industry one, which started with the end of ZIRP and AI exacerbated. An industry that used to be quite…
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Attempting to reverse engineer code review
→: Attempting to reverse engineer code reviewI keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have abdicated their responsibility for thinking and are uncritically hitting enter. But how much of that is just grumpiness? Frustration? “AI slop” is the new “I didn’t like it.” Code review was always…
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Is the software factory working?
→: Is the software factory working?When we replatformed Twill, we built a software factory: agents write most of the code, a merge queue lands it, CI decides what gets through. Which means there’s a lot of activity, and every release I cut (several a week) includes a list of changes. But I need to know if the factory is working.…
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Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
→: Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I WorkIn February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I feed it to Claude and ask “how did I do?” and “what can I learn?” Nine months in, I’m still doing it. And with that…
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What do managers even do now?
→: What do managers even do now?I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now. Not how to run a 1:1. How to think…
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Skills for a more leveraged workflow
→: Skills for a more leveraged workflowI’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of “AI skills” repos out there and I’ve only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important…
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Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
→: Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person teamWe’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: We’ve come a long way since it was just Jean and “Claude the intern”, but mostly very iteratively. We’d come to a point where it seemed worth rethinking. We…
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Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
→: Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built…