A Gate That Works, and a Gate That Only Looks Like One
RPIQ, what belongs at each stage of a quality gate pipeline, and the four questions that separate a gate with teeth from expensive decoration.
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Opus 5: the middle ground I actually chose
A tool I relied on vanished, and I scrambled. I wrote a job description for the empty seat and dropped a stand-in into it. The favourite came back, and I found it a different seat rather than its old one. Then I went to a conference and let a room full of sceptics pressure-test the whole thing.
The Speed Trap: AI Made Us Faster Than We Can Justify
Last Saturday I promised a deeper look at what actually changes when AI enters the delivery lifecycle. This is it.
The short version: the hard part is no longer producing software. It is being able to say, with evidence, why the software you just produced is safe to ship.
The arc ended on a stage: what a room of testers did to the thesis
The slides and the full talk breakdown live on the other track. This isn't that post. This is the other thing that happened at CAST26, and the reason this series ended on a stage at all: seven posts' worth of argument, finally standing in front of a room that got to push back.
CAST 2026 - Open season: what a room full of sceptics taught me about the quality gate
I promised you this recap two weeks running. Here it is — and I'm glad I waited, because it took me a fortnight to work out what the conference was actually about for me, and it wasn't the talk I gave.
Fable 5 came back. It didn't get its job back
My favourite model came back and I didn't give it the architect seat. Not because it got worse — because the seat got measured. What happens to a stack when the tool you were attached to returns.
From Vision to Production: the whole series, in one place
Over seven posts I wrote down how it actually happened: what worked, what it cost, and what failed. This is the map to all of it, so you can start wherever you want.
