Field Note
Shift Down, Not Left
Shift left moved the work earlier and dumped it on developers. Shift down moves the complexity into the platform, so they never have to carry it at all.
Topic
Engineering Judgment
Taste, tradeoffs, and the human decisions behind good software.
Field Note
The Rise of the Agent-Native Developer Platform
For thirty years we built developer platforms for developers. The next ones are built for the agents developers delegate to.
Field Note
Golden Paths for Machines
A golden path built for humans is a recommendation. A golden path built for a machine has to be an interface.
Field Note
Internal Platforms need product managers, not priests
A platform team that rules by doctrine gets compliance. A platform team that runs like a product gets adoption. Only one of those is worth anything.
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 the discipline of making software work explicit enough that machines can safely help with it.
Field Note
AI development & Engineering clarity
AI-assisted development rewards engineering clarity because faster execution amplifies the quality, ambiguity, and governance of the system around it.
Field Note
Alfred does its homework before writing a line of code
Alfred shows why agentic engineering starts before code: tickets need enough context, constraints, and evidence for machines to help safely.
Field Note
I Let an AI Agent Read My Jira Tickets Before Reviewing PRs
AI-assisted PR review only works when agents can bring issue context, implementation evidence, and review intent into the same engineering surface.