IST2025
My first conference in Turkey, and a critical-thinking talk in front of a room with no idea who I was. The discussion kept coming back to balancing AI with fundamentals. I now think balance is the wrong word.
techleadership
The model was confident and wrong. Designing for that.
Last week I argued that a quality gate earns its keep by where it sits — place the check just upstream of where the mistake turns expensive, and you catch defects while they're still cheap to fix. I stand by every word. So here's the failure that walks straight through all of it.
The overengineering tax: when three tiers cost more than one
Because that's a real failure mode, and it's the one nobody warns you about. Everyone warns you about doing too little. This is about doing too much, and calling it rigour.
The Complete AI Orchestration Journey: From Claude Web Chat to Production iOS App
The reference notes I wrote in November 2025, before BowSmith shipped: four phases, the original 17-agent team, the prompt template that cut context drift, and the failures. Lightly updated, with pointers to where the thinking went next.
Reviewer design: catching what the architect tier misses
A model's output is shaped by its assumptions, it brings the identical set of assumptions to the check. So it reads its own work and finds it sound, not because the work is sound, but because author and reviewer share a blind spot in exactly the same place.
Stop prompting, start delegating
There's a mode most people never leave, and it has clear symptoms. You write one giant instruction and cram every requirement into it. When the output is wrong, you re-roll the same message with slightly different wording, like shaking a vending machine.
The Chapter, and the Company It Keeps
Four weeks ago I put a claim on this blog: trust in software is produced, not felt. Last week I named the four ways AI-assisted delivery quietly stops producing it, and I promised that this post would do something different — walk through what is actually inside the chapter.
