Engineering

If I Had More Time, I'd Have Written Neater Code — The power of a programming language is not in what it lets you do — it's in what it doesn't. Rust may be better for agents than it is for humans. I find this funny.

To The Left, To The Left — Every step to the right on the development timeline multiplies the cost of a fix. Shift-left is the philosophy that keeps moving 'find out this is broken' earlier in the loop.

The Push Bike Harness — Most AI agent harnesses are training wheels. DEAR — Define, Enforce, Audit, Resolve — is a push bike. The ideal harness doesn't prevent falls. It catches them and teaches.

Pull the Cord — Teams get agentic tooling and point it at the existing task list. Nobody asks the agent to verify whether the documentation still reflects reality. The maintenance function needs to be explicit.

I have No Memory Of This Place — Decisions made for good reasons in 2019 become load-bearing walls in 2026. With human teams, institutional memory survives imperfectly. With AI agents, it doesn't.

Most Rules Exist for a Reason — An AI agent encountering a constraint it doesn't understand will do what any capable new hire would: question it. Unlike a new hire, it might remove the fence without asking.

Don't Hate the Agent, Hate the Process — Agents cut corners because the process lets them. When an agent does something you didn't intend, it didn't fail — it taught you where your process breaks.

Stop Asking Einstein to Run Your Datacenters — We build the most capable AI systems ever created, then use them to parse JSON and fix typos. Save the reasoning engine for work that actually requires reasoning.