Essays

Automation as a form of self-discipline: Building systems that hold you accountable

The Handoff Problem: Why Projects Fail at Team Boundaries

Analyzing 22 projects found 68% of cross-team quality issues originated in handoffs. Structured protocols reduced boundary defects by 57% and rework by 43%.

Religious Anti-Realism and Engineering Temperament

The engineering mindset demands testable claims. Intellectual honesty demands acknowledging that empiricism has boundaries, not that everything beyond them is nothing.

The Ground Truth Problem: When Your Labels Are Wrong

A review of labeling accuracy in 5 production ML datasets found error rates from 4% to 17%. When labels are wrong, models faithfully reproduce human mistakes at scale.

Via Negativa in Data Architecture: Remove More, Build Less

Applying via negativa reduced a 34-component data platform to 19, cutting failure points 41% and recovery time from 47 to 12 minutes.

When an Agent Lies: AI Hallucination as Ethical Engineering Problem

In a medical information agent, 4.2% of responses contained fabricated information. At 8,000 daily queries, that is 336 potentially harmful outputs per day. Hallucination in high-stakes contexts is an ethical failure.

Change Management Is Debugging Your Org OS

Debugging methodology recovered a stalled ERP migration in 11 weeks. Resistance was not irrational. It was accurate feedback about flawed design.

The Banality of Algorithmic Harm: Arendt Applied to Engineering

The most dangerous algorithmic harms come not from malicious actors but from competent professionals making reasonable decisions within systems whose cumulative effects no one examines.

Onboarding Reveals Every Knowledge Failure

An onboarding audit found 23 knowledge gaps affecting the entire organization. Fixing them cut time-to-productivity from 47 to 19 days.

The ethics of building systems that replace human judgment