Field Note
The Platform Team as an Economic Function
A platform team is not a cost centre. It changes the marginal cost of safe change, and that is an economic argument, not a tooling one.
Topic
Agent
Where software stops waiting for instructions and starts doing the work.
Field Note
Tiny teams, heavy systems
AI will make some teams smaller. It will not make the work lighter.
Field Note
The death of vibe coding will be boring
The next phase of AI-assisted engineering will not be more magical. It will be more explicit.
Field Note
Agentic engineering
Agentic engineering is not the art of asking AI to do more. It is the discipline of making work explicit enough that machines can safely help with it.
Field Note
How to evaluate platform engineering value
The value of a platform is not the tooling. It is the organisational friction it makes unnecessary. Platform engineering is easy to justify badly. A team builds an
Field Note
The Human in the loop is not a strategy
"Human oversight" is doing a lot of work in AI architecture diagrams. Too much, I think. It usually shows up as a reassuring little box near
Field Note
Batch vs Streaming is the Wrong Data Architecture Question
The real architectural decision isn't how fast you process data. It's what you choose to treat as a fact, and whether the machines around it can reason about those facts without asking permission.
Field Note
AI development & Engineering clarity
A few years ago, most engineering organizations were constrained by the same thing: writing code was expensive. Not just in budget terms. Expensive in attention. In coordination. In
Field Note
Alfred does its homework before writing a line of code
There’s a particular kind of frustration engineers know well: you pick up a Jira ticket and the description reads something like “Fix the thing from the meeting.” No context. No requirements/details.
Field Note
I Let an AI Agent Read My Jira Tickets Before Reviewing PRs
How GitHub Agentic Workflows + MCP turned my pull request reviews from context-switching nightmares into fully-loaded briefings