Tag: Governance

  • Why AI agents die between pilot and production

    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…

  • Why Cheaper to Build Doesn’t Mean Cheaper to Own

    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…

  • The four layers of AI-driven engineering organizations

    The four layers of AI-driven engineering organizations

    After a year of writing about what breaks when AI enters engineering organizations, I can name the single thread that connects every failure and every success: whether the organization preserved judgment while changing how work gets done. Threat modeling, governance, spec-driven development, architecture reviews, measurement problems, the CTO’s evolving role. Each post addressed a specific…

  • AI-DLC in Practice: What Structured AI Development Actually Looks Like

    AI-DLC in Practice: What Structured AI Development Actually Looks Like

    Thirty engineers in a room. One feature to build. By the end of the day, they had a validated specification, working code, and infrastructure configuration, all generated from a structured intent document they wrote together that morning. In the feedback survey, the team rated the experience 9.7 out of 10. Every single respondent expressed interest…

  • The CTO’s real job when AI changes how software gets built

    The CTO’s real job when AI changes how software gets built

    A few months ago, a CTO I know pushed a massive change directly to production. He had used an AI coding tool to generate the entire thing over a weekend, bypassed code review, skipped staging, and deployed it himself. By Monday morning, the system was broken. The QA engineer who spent two days untangling the…

  • The Community Is Building AI-DLC Without Knowing It

    The Community Is Building AI-DLC Without Knowing It

    A few weeks ago, a developer on Reddit posted about a workflow they had built for Claude Code (r/ClaudeAI, March 2026). They had split their AI-assisted development into three distinct agents: an Architect that defined the system design and constraints, a Builder that generated the code, and a Reviewer that evaluated the output against the…