AI Leadership
How engineering leaders adopt AI, set standards, and preserve judgment.
← All writingA Fighter Pilot Is Hiding in Your Engineering Practices
Scrum, CI/CD, postmortems, and now agent loops all share one skeleton. A fighter pilot most engineers have never heard of sharpened it, and the part everyone keeps dropping is the part that matters.
The Loop Is the Easy Part
Everyone is hyping agent loops. The loop was never the hard part. A fighter pilot figured that out half a century ago, long before the rest of us typed a prompt.
Effectiveness = Management × Contribution²
AI is collapsing the timeline on strategic initiatives. Work that used to take months of mapping and planning now takes days. That collapse changes the math of who should be building.
Vibe Shipping Is the Real Problem
The generation method isn't the crisis. Giving up intentional control over what ships is.
Vibe Coding Is Not a Strategy
AI can write code quickly, but engineers still own intent, architecture, standards, review, and the decision to ship.
AI Doesn't Write Spaghetti Code. You Do.
The AI slop doomerism flooding LinkedIn has the outcome right and the cause completely wrong. Bad AI code isn't an AI problem. It's a standards problem.
Your AI Can Write Code. It Still Needs Stories.
AI can generate features from a prompt. That's exactly why you need stories more than ever. Without them, you ship generic output and call it productivity.
The AI-Powered Requirements Pipeline That Makes Planning Faster
Four AI skills chained together that help a product owner turn feature ideas into developer-ready stories without starting from a blank page.
Engineering Leaders Have the Advantage in the Age of AI
Defining outcomes, reviewing output, managing feedback loops: the skills that make a great engineering leader are exactly what makes someone effective with AI.
Your AI Code Quality Problem Is Actually a Standards Problem
Developers complaining about AI-generated slop are diagnosing the wrong problem. The code isn't bad because of AI. It's bad because of you.