Trust Is the Operating System
One operating system runs a team whether the teammate is a person or an agent. My blueprint: trust, pods, outcomes over hours, managing agents like interns.
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Posts tagged engineering leadership
31 posts on engineering leadership, page 2 of 3. Or browse the full writing index →
Posts tagged engineering leadership
The 17x Discount Hiding in Your AI Coding Bill
My team's $200 AI coding seats consume $1,800–$3,500 of API-priced tokens a month. The 10–17x arbitrage nobody prices in, and how to budget for it.
A Scared Team Is Your Biggest Attack Surface
A scared employee hands over access to avoid a manager's wrath, the exact move social engineering exploits. Why psychological safety is a security control.
Surviving Technical Due Diligence as an AI Founder
What the investor's technical reviewer opens first, the AI-specific flags that re-price rounds in 2026, and the gaps you should deliberately leave alone.
Amazon Let the AI Drive. It Hit a Tree.
Amazon mandated AI coding, let it touch infrastructure unwatched, and lost millions of orders. The fix was more humans per deploy.
Your CLAUDE.md Is the Onboarding Doc You Never Wrote
A CLAUDE.md is executable tribal knowledge: the onboarding doc you never wrote for humans, finally read by something that acts on it.
The Perfect Hire Is Killing Your Team
The whiteboard coding interview rewards memorization and pedigree, the weakest predictors of real performance. Hire for trajectory instead.
We're About to Stop Making Senior Engineers
The path to senior ran through the grunt work AI now does in one prompt. The knowing-vs-doing gap hits juniors first, and here's how to grow architects anyway.
Nadella Is Right About AI and the Firm. Mostly.
Satya Nadella's 'token capital' framing is right that AI amplifies human judgment, but it's enterprise advice that skips the small teams who feel it first.
A Professional Owns the Whole Outcome
Professionalism in software is owning the whole outcome: the cost, the failure, the 3am page, the wrong call. Process and titles don't cover it.
Prompt Skills, Not Claude: Four Rules from Anthropic's Engineers
Most engineers prompt Claude one sentence at a time. Anthropic's own engineers prompt skills. Four rules from their recent talks, with the operator nuance the talks left out.
An AI Just Deleted a Production Database in Nine Seconds. Hire More Engineers.
Replit's AI agent ignored a code freeze, wiped a production database in nine seconds, then confessed it violated every principle it was given. The strongest case yet for hiring MORE senior engineers in the AI boom.