I’ve lived through 25+ years of technology hype cycles, and what they (and don’t) tell us about the one we’re living through now. There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in technology organizations at the peak of every hype cycle. The room is full of smart people. There is a slide deck. Someone presents a technology that is going to change everything; not incrementally, not in some narrow domain, but fundamentally, at the root, in ways that will render existing patterns of working obsolete within a measurable timeframe. The questions from the room range from credulous to breathless.…
Category: <span>Opinion</span>
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. – Charles Goodhart There is a moment, in the life of every flawed metric, when it stops measuring the thing you care about and starts measuring how badly people want to look good on it. That moment is invisible while it’s happening. You only see it in the rear-view mirror, usually after the budget meeting where someone asks why costs tripled and outcomes didn’t move. This week, 4 of the largest technology companies on earth hit that moment more or less simultaneously (read the article on thestreet.com),…
AI is shifting the advantage toward people who know what to do, why it matters, and how it all fits together – not just those who go deepest in a single domain. For most of the last century, the career playbook was simple: find a field, go deep, become indispensable. Depth was the moat. Specialists commanded premium salaries, held the door on complex decisions, and were the first call when something went wrong. AI hasn’t made expertise irrelevant. But it has quietly restructured where the leverage lives. “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to…
It’s a Friday afternoon, and I catch part of a conversation between a couple of colleagues. They’re trying to make sense of what “skills” means for a multi-agent platform we’re planning. One of the engineers (relatively new, but not inexperienced) asked a fair question: “Are we just expected to write a bunch of markdown files?” Engineers coming from Copilot or Claude often get tripped up by the word “skill.” The file, SKILL.md, tends to be the frame of reference. It mean something specific and narrow. The more senior engineer is trying to explain, but it’s not quite landing. The terminology…
Agile resolves human communication failures. But what happens when the humans are taken out of the loop? I shipped my first product in 1998. Waterfall. 3 months of requirements documents, a month of design specs, and 4 months of engineering – followed by a go-live that revealed, with painful precision, that the stakeholder had wanted something slightly but critically different. We had built the right system for the wrong mental model. That experience wasn’t unique. It was the norm. And it’s exactly why a group of engineers and thinkers gathered in a Utah ski lodge in February 2001 and wrote…