Productivity
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“Tokenmaxxing” Is Lines-of-Code Thinking for the Agentic Era
Engineers now compete on leaderboards for tokens consumed. I have seen this before, with lines of code. Measure the most visible input and you get more of the input and less of the outcome. The metric changes. The mistake does not.
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Minutes Added To Workforce
Most companies measure AI in cost: jobs not hired, hours saved. That misses what is happening. AI adds minutes to the workforce you already have. The question is whether you track that new capacity and use it on purpose.
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Block Just Cut 3,500 Jobs. You’re Reading It Wrong.
The headlines say troubled company. I read it differently. The cuts correct a hiring logic from the zero-rate years that was never real, and they go deeper than a return to 2019. Every company built in that window faces the same math.
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Can AI Solve the Four Burner Problem?
The Four Burner Theory says success means turning off family, friends, health, or work. I have lived it. AI may be the first technology that changes the math: more gas for every burner, not a better way to ration it.
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Putting AI to Work in Your Engineering Workflow Today
What you can do this week to cut busywork: AI for test generation, first-pass code review, and the messy automation that fixed rules could not handle. Pick one painful process, automate it, and measure it. Fix the process first, because AI will scale your dysfunction.
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The Dawn of Observability 1.0
Observability started in control theory: know the internal state of a system from its outputs. The first generation gave teams metrics, logs, and alerts, and then alert fatigue. This is where the series starts.
Software Craft · 2 min -
Efficiency matters
Before you add capacity, look at what you do and how you do it. Resources added to an inefficient process make it worse.
Engineering Leadership · 1 min -
Automate or die (slowly)
Everyone talks about technical debt. Almost no one talks about operational debt. Each manual workaround adds to it, and it will choke your product velocity.
AI & Implementation · 1 min -
Time Minimalism
One Friday, email and Slack took seven and a half hours of my focus before my real job began. Here is how I set boundaries on notifications and get those hours back.
Engineering Leadership · 3 min -
Arbitrary Constraints Power Creative Problem Solving
A deadline six months away is easy to put off. A deadline in five days is something you can feel. I run my team in one-week sprints because a tight constraint drives the work.
Engineering Leadership · 3 min