Every engineering org I talk to right now is celebrating the same number: velocity. AI writes code faster, PRs merge faster, tickets close faster. Everyone's thrilled. I think we're celebrating the wrong thing, and it's going to bite us.Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to say out loud: velocity does not equal direction. Generating a massive volume of code doesn't mean your team is moving toward the right business outcome. It doesn't mean you're building something stable or maintainabl

There's a line near the end of the Pixar movie Ratatouille that I keep coming back to lately. The food critic Anton Ego, after eating Remy's ratatouille, sits down and writes his review. He says that Gusteau's motto, "Anyone Can Cook," was always misunderstood. It doesn't mean everyone can be a great chef. It means a great chef can come from anywhere.I've believed that about software for a long time. Long before AI could write a for loop.I've spent years encouraging people without a technical ba

A CTO I worked with years ago used to tell a story about 30 monkeys in a room. Bananas are hanging from the ceiling. Every time a monkey goes for the bananas, all of them get blasted with freezing water. Eventually, they stop going for the bananas. Then you start swapping in new monkeys, one at a time. A new monkey walks in, spots the bananas, and goes for them. The others immediately stop him, even though they've never been sprayed themselves. Keep going until every original monkey is gone. Now

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