Artilect
Long-form writing on software practice, engineering culture, and technical leadership.
Professional orchestras have solved the predictability-at-scale problem. Their rehearsal structure — individual practice, section rehearsal, full orchestra, dress rehearsal — is not overhead. It is the mechanism by which reliable performance is possible. Software teams, especially in the agentic era, have the same problem and largely the same solution.
What well-meaning buyers need to know before commissioning custom software: why fixed-price contracts produce the failures they're meant to prevent, what a shared-risk engagement actually feels like, and the one question that predicts how a project will go.
The thesis that being happy, relaxed, and authentic produces better code and better teams — and why the AI era makes this argument more urgent, not less. With an organizational appendix documenting what specific companies have built.
What the most serious thinkers on software practice, systems dynamics, management, and coordination theory converge on — and what that convergence means for leading engineering teams in an era of AI-generated code.