I've spent the last three posts describing Logic Entombment as an architecture problem. Technically, it is. But the reason it persists, the reason organizations keep deferring the work, isn't technical. It's financial. More specifically, it's that the cost is invisible until it isn't.I wrote a few weeks ago about the hidden headcount in your AI bill, the idea that companies that replaced junior engineers with AI are now quietly hiring those engineers back to manage the AI, and that the labor cos

My last post talked about the problems that Logic Entombment poses for AI; now, let's talk about how we can start to fix them. One thing I've noticed in every conversation about modernizing legacy systems is that the prescription arrives before the diagnosis. Someone reads about Domain-Driven Design or microservices, gets excited, and immediately wants to rearchitect everything. I've been guilty of this myself.The problem is that "rearchitect everything" is a multi-year program that requires sus

In my last post, I introduced the idea of Logic Entombment. Business rules that are so tightly coupled with additional work overhead and infrastructure that no external system can reach them cleanly. Today, I want to get into why this is specifically bad for AI agents. Not just inconvenient. Actively hostile.I wrote about monoliths back in 2015, and the core observation I made then was that a monolith isn't a bad choice early on. It's actually the right choice for many organizations getting sta

Everyone I talk to right now is focused on the same things when it comes to AI. Which model to use? How to structure prompts? Do I fine-tune or go with RAG? How many data scientists to hire? These are real questions worth asking. But in my experience, they're not the question that's actually blocking most organizations.The thing that's blocking most organizations isn't the AI. It's that the AI has nowhere to go.I've been in software long enough to have watched the same pattern play out with ever

There's a quiet trend emerging in 2026 that exposes a fundamental flaw in how we think about AI and headcount: companies that went all-in on AI to eliminate junior roles are now hiring junior engineers back — to babysit the AI.Let that sink in.The same executives who told their boards "we're replacing entry-level headcount with AI" are now running job reqs for engineers whose primary job is to clean up after LLMs, contain runaway token costs, and fix the technical debt that "vibe-coding" le

This opinion might not be popular, but a recent trip to Walt Disney World has convinced me that Disney Fastpass+ is great for Disney's bottom line, but is horrible for visitors to Walt Disney World.For those who aren't familiar with it, you can read all the details about it at Disney's site here. The gist of it is you reserve a place in line for up to three rides a day to help shorten your wait time for those three rides. Disney tries to sell it as allowing you to get on the rides

Lately, everywhere I look, I read about the Microservice "tax". Meaning, when you implement microservices, there are new dynamics involved that your company may not be accustomed to dealing with such asAdditional operations overhead - Rather than just focusing on keeping one or two farms of servers up and running to a reasonable SLA, you have to instead worry about as many farms as you have microservices. Communication between services is slower than in process communications and have

One thing I've had to do a lot over the years is deal with a Monolith . In some cases, it was not a bad experience; in others, it was pretty horrific. Often, monoliths aren't an intended outcome, but unless you take explicit actions to isolate functionality as the code grows, the code base will gradually grow into a Ball of Mud. A codebase starts out small and focused, but over time it grows organically as new user stories are added.  As these new user stories

Recently I was discussing whether to use JSON or XML as the data exchange format for a web service. I was surprised to hear that in today's environment my coworker wanted to use XML instead of JSON. As for myself, I pushed for JSON for a number of reasons.Now, back when I first started coding years ago, XML was just gaining in popularity. At the time, the flexibility provided by the data structure was something new and incredibly useful. Couple that with its ability to h

I saw this post and felt sick to my stomach. I can't believe that Disney is testing eliminating a wait for any line. To me, part of a vacation is the ability to kick back and go with the flow, make things up as you go along. I know with Disney, there is a growing segment of the population that feels like it's a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they want it to be perfect. So they plan everything down to the last minute. However, these are also the type of people who come