The Journal
Essays
Long-form writing on AI, philosophy, psychology, and systems thinking.
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Tillich’s Ultimate Concern and the Idol of Productivity
Paul Tillich defined idolatry as elevating a finite thing to ultimate significance. When 61% of technology workers measure self-worth by productivity, productivity has become the industry's idol.
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Designing Systems That Survive Their Architects
Systems with comprehensive documentation maintained 94% operational effectiveness 12 months after architect departure, compared to 47% for systems relying on tribal knowledge.
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Change Management for Engineering Teams
Studying 5 process change initiatives found the 2 that succeeded addressed engineers' autonomy, tooling, and evidence concerns. Co-designed processes achieved 83% adoption.
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Writing as Thinking: Why Technical Leaders Write
Leaders who write weekly produce 52% fewer dependency conflicts and 3x fewer reversed decisions. Writing is the thinking, not documentation of it.
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Database Architecture Decisions Outlast Every Other Technical Choice
In 22 systems, database decisions made in the first 3 months remained the most constraining technical choice 5 to 10 years later. Only 3 ever migrated, at an average cost of 7.4 engineering months.
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Evaluating LLMs Is the Hardest Problem in AI Engineering
Teams without systematic evaluation ship features with 3.4x higher defect rates. Building rigorous evaluation infrastructure is the hardest and most valuable AI engineering problem.
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The Ship of Theseus and Continuous Deployment
The average application replaces 97% of its code within 5 years. The Ship of Theseus reveals that system identity is narrative continuity and purpose, not material composition.
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Autonomous Agents Need Ethical Guardrails, Not Ethical Training
Agents with prompt-based ethics violated boundaries at 14.3 per 1,000 actions. Architectural guardrails reduced violations to 0.8 per 1,000. The difference is architectural, not behavioral.
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Agile’s Midlife Crisis: Returning to First Principles
Teams closest to Agile's original principles had the fewest certifications and lightest processes. The industry built around Agile inverted its promise.
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Observability for Ethical Systems: Monitoring Beyond Uptime
Adding fairness metrics to a recommendation system serving 1.2 million users revealed 3 systematic biases that traditional uptime and latency monitoring missed over 14 months.