Why This, Why Now

I grew up in a small rural community in northwest Iowa, and for a long time all I wanted was to get out. I wanted to live and work somewhere bigger, at companies more progressive than the businesses I grew up around. I did that for a short stretch, and then spent most of my career back in agriculture, building software for farmers.

Most of that time went into building things rather than writing about them: software, platforms, teams, whole organizations. Lately I’ve started to think that was a mistake. Not because I need a personal brand, but because a lot of the assumptions I built that career on are suddenly worth questioning. Software engineering is changing. So are the economics of producing software and the relationship between engineers and their tools, and I expect the way technology organizations are structured to change with them.

AI is part of that, but I’m less interested in AI as a category than in what it changes. What happens to engineering organizations when producing code stops being the scarce part? Nobody really knows yet, which is what makes it interesting.

The bottlenecks are moving

For most of my career, software has been expensive. Not because typing code is hard, but because turning an idea into a reliable system takes an enormous amount of human attention. That cost shaped nearly everything, from roadmaps and team structures to what people thought was possible. AI is starting to change it. I don’t think it removes the constraint so much as moves it, and I expect a lot of the next few years to be about figuring out where it went.

I’m interested in agency

The engineers I’ve learned the most from understand the goal and act on it. Now the systems we build can do a version of that too. They can interpret a goal, use tools, and act, which puts human agency and machine agency in the same room. How much autonomy we should give those systems, and how much we should give people, interests me a lot more than another list of AI use cases.

I want to think in public

I don’t expect everything I write here to be right, and some of it will age badly. In leadership especially, there’s a habit of only publishing ideas once they’ve been polished into certainty, which strips out the interesting part. I’d rather write while I’m still working things out. My views will change. If I’m thinking about all this the same way five years from now, something went wrong.

Why now?

Because the rules seem to be changing faster than the institutions built around them. There’s a lot of noise, but there’s something real underneath it. Small teams can attempt things that used to take much larger ones, and engineers are shifting from implementing every detail to directing increasingly capable systems. Some practices will matter more than ever. Others will turn out to have been artifacts of constraints that no longer exist.

I’ve always learned more by building than by watching, and writing is part of that for me. It forces an idea to become precise enough that someone can disagree with it, and it shows me pretty quickly when something I believe doesn’t hold together. I’d like a record of how my thinking changes as the technology does. That’s what this is for.