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Articles

Long-form on modern production systems.

Essays on the practices, patterns, and principles that make software production durable. Filed by topic, written to be referenced more than once.

  1. Platforms

    Platforms Are Paved Roads, Not Walled Gardens

    Internal platforms work when they make the right path the easiest path, not when they make every other path impossible. The mature platform is a paved road for common journeys, guardrails for catastrophic risk, and visible exits for everything the road does not yet cover.

  2. AI Engineering

    When Code Gets Cheap, Coordination Gets Expensive

    AI-assisted development is making software easier to generate, but not automatically easier to ship. The next bottleneck is engineering management: ownership, review, decision rights, platform maturity, and absorbing machine-rate work without creating human-rate chaos.

  3. AI Engineering

    AI Didn't Make Your Company Faster. It Made Your Failure Scalable.

    AI genuinely speeds up individual work. But an organization is not the sum of its productive individuals. When decision-making, ownership, review, integration, and trust stay slow, AI doesn't remove your bottlenecks. It makes them visible, and then scalable.

  4. AI Engineering

    Fail Fast, Consolidate Faster

    Modern organizations have become very good at trying new technology and much less disciplined at absorbing it. In the AI era, the risk is not experimentation itself, but experimentation without consolidation.

  5. AI Engineering

    AI Engineering Needs Audit, Not Faith

    Useful AI in engineering keeps the same property useful tests have: a human can read what happened, where it went wrong, and decide what to do next. The argument is not that AI is dangerous. It is that anything shipping to production has to be inspectable when it fails.

  6. SRE

    SLOs Are a Reliability Question, Not a Number

    A service-level objective is not a number on a dashboard. It is an answer to the question 'how reliable is reliable enough, and to whom?' Without that framing, the math becomes reliability theater.

  7. DevOps

    DevOps Is a Production Line

    DevOps is not a tooling movement. It is the cultural import of a hundred years of production engineering into software — and reading it that way makes the discipline coherent again.