Leadership
Institutional knowledge, cognitive load, organizational design, and the management patterns that make teams effective. Sometimes the AI is involved. Sometimes it's just people.
11 posts
- 12 min read
How Technical Keystones Burn Out (And Why Their Managers Don't Notice)
After three burnouts in seven years as the technical keystone at one role, the mechanism became clear: burnout in technical leadership runs on domain breadth, context switching, and the mutual silence between the person carrying the load and the people who could redistribute it.
- 7 min read
Your Clients Know You're Lying About Incident Reports
When your organization calls a misconfiguration an 'attack' or spins a three-month infrastructure failure as a 'security upgrade,' your clients aren't fooled. They're just deciding whether to say something.
- 11 min read
Every Management Failure Is a Retrieval Failure
The information existed. Someone knew. The failure was that knowledge couldn't reach the person who needed it, when they needed it. The fix isn't 'communicate better' — it's building retrieval infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans remembering to use it.
- 5 min read
Latency Kills Curiosity
The same pattern that bounces a visitor from a slow website also erodes curiosity in careers, teams, and minds. Latency isn't just page speed. It's any friction between a person and the thing they're trying to explore.
- 7 min read
The Discovery Tax
Discovery phases feel expensive. Skipping them is more expensive. Every 'just build it' directive is a bet that you understand the problem completely before starting. That bet almost never pays.
- 6 min read
I Have a Team Now — It Just Happens to Be AI
The progression from 'AI helps me write emails' to 'I manage a department of specialized agents across six domains' happened in eight months. The output scaled. The cognitive load dropped. That combination is new.
- 6 min read
I Manage AI Agents the Way I Manage Teams
Separation of concerns, governance docs, knowing when to restructure. The same management principles that make human teams effective apply directly to AI agents — with examples from a multi-agent production workflow.
- 7 min read
Governance Is Architecture
AI governance isn't a compliance checklist — it's an architectural decision. How you structure agent permissions, context windows, and audit trails determines whether your AI system is reliable or just fast.
- 5 min read
AI Adoption: The 0.04% Don't Know They're the 0.04%
The people actually building with AI are too busy building to post about it. If the LinkedIn AI feed makes you feel behind, you're measuring against the wrong cohort.
- 8 min read
The AI Perimeter: Where Automation Should End and Judgment Should Begin
AI is the most powerful tool most of us have ever had. That makes knowing when not to use it the actual skill.
- 5 min read
What Is Pass@1?
Pass@1 means your AI agent gets it right on the first attempt. The methodology: governance documents thorough enough to eliminate ambiguity, so the first generation is the one you ship.