Why This, Why Now
For years I’ve owned brycehemme.com and done almost nothing with it.
That’s about to change.
I’ve spent most of the last two decades building software, teams, and organizations. Along the way I’ve learned something interesting: the most valuable ideas rarely come from formal strategy sessions or polished presentations. They come from working on hard problems, experimenting with new technology, and reflecting on what’s happening in real time.
Right now feels like one of those moments.
We’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how software gets built.
AI coding systems, agents, and new development workflows are fundamentally changing how software gets built. The shift feels similar to other inflection points I’ve lived through — cloud computing, mobile, DevOps — but this one is moving faster and touching more layers of the stack at once.
And unlike those past shifts, this one won’t stay contained to software. Agents are going to transform every corner of how businesses operate — R&D, supply chain, finance, HR, legal, customer experience. Software just happens to be where it’s hitting first.
Most people don’t see it yet. I think of them as AI sleepwalkers — people and organizations moving through this moment on autopilot, not fully grasping the scale of what’s coming or what it will demand of them. In industry, companies are bolting copilots onto existing workflows and calling it transformation. In the broader population, there’s a vague awareness that “AI is a thing” without any real understanding of how profoundly it’s going to reshape work, careers, and daily life. By the time most people wake up, the landscape will have already shifted underneath them.
That said, this isn’t really a failing of any individual or organization. We’re in the very early innings. The tools are changing month to month, the best practices haven’t been written yet, and nobody has a proven playbook for what an AI-native company or career actually looks like. It’s hard to wake up to something when the picture is still coming into focus.
But that’s exactly why paying attention now matters. The people and organizations that are experimenting, iterating, and thinking critically about this shift — even without perfect answers — are the ones that will be best positioned when things start to crystallize.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about questions like:
- What does an AI-native engineering organization look like?
- How do development teams operate when agents become collaborators?
- What does the software development lifecycle look like when large portions of code are generated?
- How should companies rethink engineering productivity in this new world?
But I also spend a lot of time building things — side projects, tools, experiments — because I’ve always believed the best way to understand technology is to actually use it.
This blog will be a place to write about a few different themes:
- AI and the future of software development
- Things I’m building
- Leadership and engineering organizations
- Interesting ideas or mental models
- Occasionally, a few reflections on life and family
It won’t be overly polished. Most posts will likely be short.
Think of it as notes from the frontier while we all figure out what the next era of software looks like.
More soon.