Why I Still Build

I don’t write code as part of my day job. At this point in my career, if I were, I’d be spending my time on the wrong things. My job is to lead: set direction, build organizations, and create the conditions for engineers to do their best work.

Outside of work, I still build. Sometimes it’s personal projects and experiments. Sometimes it’s contributing to open source projects. And sometimes it’s nonprofit work, like the cloud infrastructure behind The Math Agency, which I co-founded and helped build from the ground up.

Building is bigger than coding

I haven’t hand-written much code in a while. AI does most of that now. But code was never most of the work. A real system needs somewhere to run and everything that comes with that, so I still design systems, stand up infrastructure, wire together pipelines, and figure out why something that should work absolutely doesn’t. These days it mostly starts with intent. I describe what I want, agents do most of the typing, and my part is directing the work and judging what comes back.

What it teaches me

Mostly where agents help, where they get confused, and what I can safely hand off, which you only find out by building. Small projects are also honest in a way work rarely is. There’s no platform team to absorb the pain. If the deployment is painful, I feel it, and if the architecture is more complicated than it needs to be, I’m the one living with it.

Why it matters

I don’t do this to stay credible. The engineers I work with don’t need me reviewing their pull requests.

I do it because technical intuition decays, and right now it decays fast. Something that took a team a few years ago might be an afternoon project today. If you stop touching the technology entirely, it’s easy to lead from an outdated model of what’s hard, and that model quietly shapes what you expect from teams, how you staff, and where you think the bottlenecks are.

My day job keeps me mostly on the strategy side. Building on my own time is how I stay honest about the rest of it. I never really stopped being a builder; the tools just changed.