Dev reflection - February 17, 2026

Hey, it’s Paul. Tuesday, February 17, 2026.

I want to talk about staging areas. Not the technical kind—the human kind. The places where work goes to sit. The inbox you check before forwarding. The draft folder. The approval queue. The meeting where someone presents something that’s already been decided, just so everyone can nod.

Every organization is full of these. And the question I keep bumping into is: how many of them are actually doing something, and how many are just… there? Residue from a time when someone needed a checkpoint, and now nobody remembers why, but nobody’s willing to remove it either.

Here’s what got me thinking about this. I’ve been building content workflows where material moves through stages—raw input, intermediate draft, finished output. Standard pipeline stuff. And in one case, I realized the intermediate stage was doing nothing. Content was landing there, sitting for a moment, and then moving on unchanged. The stage existed because the system was designed with the assumption that everything needs a middle step. But for this particular type of content, the middle step was fiction. The work was ready when it arrived.

So I deleted it. Skipped straight from source to output. And the interesting thing is, nothing broke. Nothing got worse. The output quality was the same. The only thing that changed was speed.

But here’s the part that matters: I didn’t delete the intermediate stage for every content type. Some flows still need it. The judgment call isn’t “staging areas are bad.” It’s “this particular staging area, for this particular kind of work, was ceremony pretending to be safety.” And that distinction—between useful friction and performative friction—is one of the hardest things to see clearly, whether you’re designing software or running a team.

Think about your own work. How many steps in your process exist because they protect quality, and how many exist because removing them would require someone to make a decision and be accountable for it? Most approval workflows I’ve seen in organizations aren’t really about catching errors. They’re about distributing blame. If something goes wrong, everyone can point to the chain of sign-offs and say, “Well, I approved it, but so did they.”

That’s not safety. That’s theater.

Second thing. There’s a related idea I’ve been sitting with, which is that you cannot give a system autonomy without giving it the ability to observe itself. These two things feel separate—capability and monitoring—but they’re actually the same investment viewed from different angles.

I shipped some autonomous workflow features recently alongside timing telemetry and error tracking. Not “alongside” as in “at the same time, coincidentally.” Alongside as in: they are the same feature. The autonomy is the capability. The observability is the constraint that makes the capability safe. You can’t have one without the other. Or rather, you can, but you shouldn’t, because what you get is a system that acts without anyone—including itself—knowing what it’s doing or how long it takes.

This maps directly onto delegation in any organization. When a manager says “I can’t delegate this because I need to stay close to it,” what they’re usually saying is “I don’t have visibility into how this work happens when I’m not watching.” The problem isn’t trust. The problem is instrumentation. They haven’t built the feedback loops that would let them know, after the fact, whether the work went well.

So they insert themselves as the feedback loop. They become the staging area. And now you’ve got a bottleneck that looks like leadership but is actually a monitoring gap.

The fix isn’t “just trust people more.” The fix is building the observation layer that makes trust rational. Dashboards, check-ins, metrics, whatever—the mechanism matters less than the principle. You can remove yourself from the approval chain when you can see what happened without being in the room.

Third thing, and this one’s been nagging at me. There’s a tension between making systems flexible and making them traceable. I’ve been moving some system behavior out of code and into configuration—database settings that can change how things operate without deploying new software. It’s faster. It’s more responsive. And it’s less visible.

When behavior lives in code, it gets reviewed. It gets versioned. There’s a history. When behavior lives in a database row, it just… changes. Someone flips a setting, and now the system works differently, and unless you’re watching closely, you might not notice.

This is the shadow side of agility. Every organization that’s moved toward “move fast and break things” has encountered this. The speed is real. The breakage is also real, and it’s harder to diagnose because the change that caused it didn’t go through the normal channels.

I don’t have a clean answer here. I think the honest position is: this is a tradeoff, and you have to make it with your eyes open. Flexibility and traceability pull in opposite directions. The question for any given decision is which one costs more to get wrong.

Last thing. I’ve been experimenting with parallel execution—multiple independent work streams running simultaneously. And what surprised me is that parallelism isn’t primarily a speed optimization. It’s a clarity test. If two things can run at the same time without colliding, their boundaries are clean. If they can’t, you’ve found hidden coupling you didn’t know existed.

That’s useful even when you don’t need the speed. “Could two people do this simultaneously without stepping on each other?” is one of the best diagnostic questions you can ask about any process. If the answer is no, you’ve found where the real dependencies live—and they’re usually not where the org chart says they are.

So here’s what I’m left with. The question isn’t whether to automate or delegate or parallelize. It’s whether your systems—human or technical—are legible enough to operate without someone standing over them. And if they’re not, the work isn’t building more checkpoints. It’s building better visibility.

That’s it for today.