Your product works until someone actually uses it. The gap between ‘works in dev’ and ‘works for a person’ is where most systems fail — and most organizations avoid looking.
When work changes velocity, governance systems don’t just fall behind. They become theater. And theater is worse than nothing—it gives you the feeling of control without any of the substance.
Continuous delivery removed the endings from work. That felt like progress. But without formal completion, you lose the ability to say what you actually accomplished — and more importantly, what you’re done thinking about.
The most dangerous failures in any system — technical or organizational — aren’t the ones throwing errors. They’re the ones that appear to work perfectly. And they’ll keep appearing to work perfectly right up until they don’t.
When AI handles implementation, the human job shifts from doing the work to understanding the work. Speed without understanding is just technical debt with better commit messages.
I want to talk about something that happened this week that I almost missed because it looked boring. Five separate software projects — all mine, all running semi-autonomously with AI pipelines — i…
Three projects independently discovered the same bug pattern today — code that reports success when something important didn’t happen. The most dangerous failures don’t look like failures at all.
I want to talk about something that happened this week that looks like a technical problem but is actually a management problem. And I think it maps onto something most organizations are going to f…