Distilled conclusions.
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The AI Tool Dependency You Didn’t Choose
The CTO of a Series B healthtech company approved full adoption of an AI coding agent for her twelve engineers in the middle of a compliance-critical sprint, because the acceleration was real. Within six weeks the team had moved its whole development workflow inside the tool: custom skills encoding how they elaborated and built features,…
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MCP Changed How I Work: Lessons Learned
I started using MCP with GitHub Copilot in early 2025, before most organizations had heard of the protocol. By May of that year I was presenting about it at Global Azure Madrid, and a few weeks later at AWS Community Day Colombia. In both talks I walked through the architecture, demonstrated server compositions, and warned…
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Platform Engineering Is Not Just “the New DevOps”
Earlier this year I described what I called DevOps theater: organizations that renamed their operations team, bought a CI/CD tool, and declared the transformation complete while the culture stayed exactly where it was. A few weeks later I wrote that IaC is a prerequisite for DevOps, not the destination, after watching team after team confuse having Terraform…
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AI Cost Governance Is an Architecture Problem
A healthtech CTO I worked with blew her quarterly AI budget in six weeks. Her team of twelve engineers had adopted Claude Code across every workflow, the results were genuine, and the billing model changed mid-quarter. Some developers were generating $80 to $200 in daily charges. The CFO called, the board asked questions, and the…
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AI Layoffs Aren’t Working: The Jevons Paradox
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. His observation was counterintuitive and has stayed that way for 160 years: James Watt’s steam engine was dramatically more efficient than its predecessor, and British coal consumption went up, not down. The efficiency made coal-powered machinery cheaper to operate, which expanded demand for it…
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Why AI agents die between pilot and production
Consider a financial services CTO sponsoring an AI agent to automate Know Your Customer (KYC) document verification. The details are composite, but the sequence is one I have seen play out more than once. The pilot was her idea, she secured the budget, she was in the room for every blocker. When compliance said the…
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The CTO’s credibility moat: why the CAIO inherits the judgment you stopped using
A CTO I know approved an AI coding tool rollout he did not understand. The technology was within his reach, he had not touched one in nine months, so he no longer knew which questions to ask. He sat through the vendor demo, nodded at the architecture slide, asked a question about pricing, and signed.…
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Why Cheaper to Build Doesn’t Mean Cheaper to Own
A private equity firm was running due diligence on a SaaS company. Standard process: evaluate the product, the market position, and the technical defensibility. But this time, the consulting team added a new step. They took the target company’s core product and asked an AI coding assistant to replicate it. In days, they had a…
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AI Comprehension Debt: The Codebase Nobody Understands
Six months ago, a fintech team I work with shipped an authentication service in three days. Claude generated most of it, the senior engineer who prompted it reviewed and approved, and the service passed all tests. It worked. Last month, a different team member needed to modify the token refresh logic. She spent four days…
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The 5x Myth: What AI Actually Changes About Delivery Speed
A fintech CTO I work with had her board moment three months ago. The chair leaned forward mid-review and asked the question every technology executive dreads: “So you’re telling me you don’t know if this is working?” Her answer was better than most: “I’m telling you that the numbers we were using to answer that…
