How-To.
The long ones. A lesson hands you the idea in ten minutes and an opinion argues a position. A how-to walks the whole way through doing the thing: the sequence, the parts that break, the numbers worth watching, and what to build first when you can't build all of it at once.
One guide per subject, kept long on purpose, and dated because some of this names tools that will age. Read one when you've already decided to do the thing and need to know how it actually goes.
Build an agentic-first delivery org
A no-half-measures playbook for taking a delivery org from agents-assist to agents-ship: the technical rails, the cultural rewiring, and the 90-day sequence, each with a metric attached and a smaller version you can start with.
- Seven moves, each with a metric attached and a minimum viable version
- The two-plane architecture, and the gate that is the only path between them
- A 90-day sequence, a nine-number scorecard, and a calculator for your own change classes
How to be bold
Bold isn't confidence and it isn't volume. It's saying something specific enough that you could be publicly, checkably wrong about it. Here's the mechanical version: where opinions come from, when to drive, when to push once and let go, when to say nothing, and how to keep the score nobody else is keeping.
- A definition of bold you can practise, instead of a personality you're told to have
- Four postures, picked by two questions: do you own it, and do you know it
- Rules for holding back, a conviction budget, and a scorecard the org won't keep for you
Deliver software straight to production
Laptop to production, nothing maintained in between. The argument for deleting your non-prod environments, the four things that have to be true before you can, and the order to build them in so you don't take the safety net down before the new one is up.
- The distinction that decides it: an environment you maintain versus a process you destroy
- A fifteen-minute budget from merge to production, and where the time actually goes
- The build order, the metrics for each step, and the cases where none of this applies
Change a culture fast
Culture change is slow because almost everyone aims it at the wrong layer, spreads it the wrong way, and measures it with an instrument that can't see it working. Aim at behaviour, seed dense clusters, and you need a quarter of the room rather than all of it.
- Why the arrow runs from behaviour to belief, and what that changes about Monday
- The 25% threshold, and why sentiment surveys go quiet right before it flips
- Six moves, the cost you have to accept, and the cases that are systems problems wearing a culture costume
Diagnose an AI-forward org in a week
Six questions, asked in order, each with the artefact to ask for and the answer that ends the diagnosis early. You're not auditing tools. You're finding the one constraint that's making everything downstream of generation slower, and a week is long enough.
- Six probes in sequence, with the artefact to request and the red flag for each
- The one-hour observation that beats all six, and why nobody does it
- A one-page output: two named failures, in order, and what you're deliberately not fixing
Rebuild your interview loop for agentic engineering
The take-home came back in forty minutes and it's perfect. Banning the tools is the wrong argument, and so is allowing them without changing anything. Four exercises, written out, that test what the job actually is now.
- What stopped predicting, and the question that replaces 'do you use AI'
- Four exercises with the prompt, the planted failures, and how to score them
- What to keep from the old loop, the early-career version, and what running this honestly costs