The Stages of Judgment-Driven Development Most of the pain I’ve seen in software wasn’t caused by bad code. It was caused by bad decisions that were never treated explicitly as such. In the last two posts, I argued that execution is no longer the bottleneck. AI made building cheap. Judgment is now the scarce resource. If that’s true, the way we develop software must change, not in terminology or ceremonies, but in where and how we place judgment. ...
What “Human Judgment” Actually Means in the Age of AI We often talk about judgment as if it were intuition, taste, or seniority, something vague that people either have or don’t. That framing is wrong. Judgment is not intuition. It’s accountability. In real systems, judgment isn’t about gut feeling or instinct. It’s about being accountable for decisions made under uncertainty. Judgment shows up in moments like deciding something is good enough to ship, deciding not to ship even though it technically works, deciding to stop a direction after weeks of investment, or deciding that a shortcut today will become an unacceptable liability six months from now. ...
When Vibe Coding Meets Reality I didn’t start thinking about this because I’m excited about AI writing code. I started thinking about it because I kept seeing the same patterns repeat over the years. This time, they come under a new name: vibe coding, the habit of describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI scaffold the system for you, often without deeply understanding the code it produces. ...
I heard Satya Nadella describe this week on the All-In podcast how LinkedIn has been collapsing product management, UX, and engineering roles into a single “full-stack builder” role. The framing was optimistic: AI reduces construction costs and speeds up delivery. At a surface level, this makes sense. AI dramatically accelerates prototyping, implementation, and iteration. In many environments, the traditional separation between PM, design, and engineering really does introduce friction that slows learning and execution. ...
CV Match: Why I Built It, What I Refused to Build, and What I Learned After 100 Real Users A Small Number, a Real Moment CV Match has been out in the world for a few months now. I almost didn’t notice when it crossed 100 installations. That number, by itself, is not impressive. It is small. Almost trivial. What made me stop was not the number, but the realization that this thing actually existed in the hands of people I did not know. Real users, not personas. Real decisions, not demos. ...
The Full Stack PM I have always believed in the idea of the full stack product manager. Not because one person should do everyone’s job, but because product work does not respect org charts. Products fail and succeed in the gaps between roles, and when those gaps exist, someone has to step in and own them. Many organizations like clear distinctions: technical PMs, product owners, delivery PMs, growth PMs. On paper, it looks clean. In practice, it often creates waste. Handoffs. Waiting. Endless alignment meetings. Everyone does their part, but nobody owns the outcome. ...
Early in my career, coming from industrial engineering, I learned a simple rule that has shaped the way I think about software development ever since. Software may look abstract, creative, fluid. But underneath, it behaves like a production system. The best articulation of this idea appears in The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, one of the most influential books I have ever read. In production, every system revolves around three outputs you can influence: ...
The Answer Is Still Cookies A few days ago, I saw a Cookie Monster quote that made me stop: “Me don’t know da question, but me know da answer is cookies.” It is funny. It is childish. And it is exactly how companies behave when they insist their problems are special. Every company believes it is fundamentally different. Different industry. Different technology. Different customers. Different speed. Therefore, their problems must be new, unprecedented, uniquely complex. ...
From CLS to Agentic AI I was born in 1977, right at the intersection of two worlds. Old enough to remember analog. Young enough to grow with digital. My first program was written on a Dragon 32, a home computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM and a keyboard that felt like it came from a typewriter factory. My oldest brother brought it home one afternoon, and it was the first computer I ever saw in real life. ...
A Fool with a Tool Long ago, I met a senior executive from NBC who liked to say: “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” It was true then, when the “tools” were spreadsheets, automation scripts, or a shiny new CRM. It’s even truer today, when the tools in question are large language models and autonomous agents. Over the past year, AI has moved from novelty to necessity. The experiments are over; the adoption curve has turned vertical. ...