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The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 in response to heavyweight, process-centric software development. It argued that communication and adaptability mattered more than rigid plans and documentation. That is still true, but AI changes the economics. Maybe it's time for a refresh? This post AI Manifesto first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
87% of digital workers now use AI at work. 75% say it makes them more productive, but some of the gains are being swallowed by a new, largely invisible AI tax, e.g. Botsitting. Botsitting is the work required to make AI usable, including feeding it missing context, checking its outputs, debugging its mistakes, rerunning prompts, and cleaning up the confident-but-wrong answers AI leaves behind.…
As AI compresses the effort required to write code, the non-coding portions of software development consume a larger percentage of total effort. And those are precisely the activities that offshore models have traditionally struggled with. I believe the future belongs to smaller teams, closer to the business, amplified by AI. This post It's Time to Rethink the Offshore Development Model first…
Who takes accountability when AI systems fail? A model can deny a loan. A model can misprice risk, yet a model cannot be sanctioned in a way a human or company can. You can fine a corporation, but only a human can apologize. Only a corporation or human can face legal consequences. This post AI Meat Shields first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Like everyone, I'm very curious to see how AI is going to impact individual jobs as well as overall organizational models. I believe the more impactful change will be on the organizational side and Block is leading the thinking in this space. This post Inside Block’s AI-Native Organization first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Do you remember when you first saw the movie The Matrix, and Neo learns Kung Fu, or Trinity learns to fly a helicopter just by uploading a new skill? If your software engineers are LLMs then welcome to Vercel's skills.sh This post Vercel Skills.sh first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Whether you’re prompting a large language model or asking a colleague for help, the quality of the context you provide is often the difference between getting what you want, or not. In other words, context engineering isn’t just for LLMs. It’s unreasonably effective with humans too. This post Context Engineering for Humans first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
The importance of a differentiated data model is rising dramatically. AI is commoditizing code. Technical execution is table stakes rather than a competitive advantage. Your product's core data abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right. This post Your Data Model is Your Destiny first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
How many of us have experienced team building that left feeling like it was a waste of time and money? If you've had that experience, I have some suggestions. This post Better Team Building first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Sign up. Remind me. Subscribe. Upgrade. Connect. Accept. Agree. Scan. Tip. Review. I have had it with all the constant prompts and requests for my attention. I just want to be left alone. The modern world is suffocating my zen. This post Leave Me Alone first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Last week OpenAI published a report detailing why AI models hallucinate. The reason that AI models hallucinate is not because the model is "broken" or the math behind the models is wrong. Instead, the reasearchers claim that hallucinations are a predictable, systemic outcome of how we train and, more importantly, how we test these systems. In short, the models have been taught that it’s better to…
Shopify Chief Executive Tobi Lütke sent an internal memo that said Shopify won’t make new hires unless managers can prove artificial intelligence isn’t capable of doing the job. Teams at the e-commerce company need to integrate AI into their workflows, and doing so will be expected of all employees going forward, according to the memo. This post "AI First" Hiring Starts Now first appeared on Dan…
Businesses don’t always realize as they grow and mature they add “weight”, or more accurately, “mass”. The more massive an object, the more energy required to change its direction. This post Less Mass = More Agility first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
“The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will…
We are increasingly aware of the basic risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI), such as generating harmful advice, producing buggy code, and spreading inaccurate (or misleading) information. Some of us have even considered the dangers of AI providing accurate information for nefarious purposes (e.g. "How do I make a ghost gun?"). However, a larger societal risk looms — the possibility…
Customer care is undergoing a transformation unlike anything we've seen before. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) agents are proliferating across communication channels — handling real-time voice calls, managing text-based interactions such as chat, SMS, and email, and delivering a level of efficiency that traditional customer service teams often struggle to achieve. However, the horizon…
Gardeners don't 'create' or 'produce' tomatoes. They can only create an environment where tomato plants will thrive. The point is if the environment is healthy, growth happens. There are a lot of factors to consider - the quality of the soil, the weather, pests... the list goes on. Similarly, how do we create healthy growth in our organizations? This post Healthy Things Grow first appeared on Dan…
If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect increasing the value of someone else's vote. This post There is no such thing as not voting first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Today I read that hospitals in Germany said they would cancel elective procedures; in Britain, some doctors in the National Health Service were unable to gain access to systems. Sky News, a major news channel in Britain, could not operate. At JPMorgan Chase there were delays in processing trades because bankers could not log into their work systems. How do we prevent this? This post CrowdStrike…
According to Ben Horowitz "peacetime" and "wartime" CEOs require radically different management styles. I believe this concept applies to CIOs as well. As an effective CIO, you never just take a job. You are accepting a mission. This post The Adaptive CIO: Peacetime vs. Wartime Leadership first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
I once worked with an organization that developed five year strategic plans, while at the same time teaching its employees that we live in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. See the irony? Either planning or reacting - organizations best able to adapt to their environment win. This post Rethinking Strategy: Planning vs. Reacting first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs — which seems fanciful and naive. The nature of problem-solving is we are aware of problems long before we are aware of their solutions. There will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve. To solve them we must believe we can. This post Pessimists sound smart. Optimists change the world. first…
Do you how bees communicate with each other to share information about food sources? The bees communicate this critical information by performing a type of dance called the waggle dance. The other bees then follow the instructions and go harvest the flowers. Yet, some bees ignore the dance. Why? This post Adventure Bees first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Charlie Munger has been Warren Buffet’s partner since he joined Berkshire Hathaway as a vice chairman in 1978. In 1995 Charlie gave a speech at Harvard University about human decision-making and factors contributing to misjudgments. He wanted to share what he had observed and learned; models he used that helped him (and Berkshire Hathaway) succeed. This post Remembering Charlie Munger first…
When hiring software engneers I look beyond technical talent. What I really want is someone who understands "the ecosystem" they work in. Recruiting is always challenging. I think this is a good start to help you spot the great ones. This post On Being a Modern Software Explorer first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Companies say they want engaged employees. Funny, I’ve never heard an employee say they wanted to be "engaged" (at least not to their company). Personally, I’d much rather be inspired. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in a weekend. Inspiration literally brings the future forward like a time machine. This post Inspiration is a Time Machine first appeared on Dan…
Having worked in financial services for most of my career I want to share some the software engineering challenges that are associated with tracking and moving money digitally. Most of these lessons have been learned the hard way. Hopefully they will be useful to anyone moving into the fintech space. This post Fintech Engineering Challenges first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
We think that generative AI creativity is limited by its training data and algorithms, and therefore can produce technically proficient content, but not truly novel and innovative content. We like to believe that our own creativity and innovation, rooted in personal experience, knowledge, and human emotions results in intentionality and emotional depth that cannot be replicated by AI. Current…
The Biden administration has collected “voluntary commitments” from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon to pursue shared AI safety and transparency goals ahead of a planned executive order. Will it be enough? This post Voluntary AI Safety? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Corporate bullsh*t can be a handy supply of manure for fertilizing new ideas and innovation. Corporate bullsh*t also has a number of negative effects on both employees and organizations, including a tendency to suppress those with differing opinions and perspectives. The most detrimental consequence of rampant organizational bullsh*t is the corrosion of organizational decision-making. Can you spot…
Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow) describes system re-writes as “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make”. However, engineering teams love full rewrites because they incorrectly think of old systems as specs. They assume that since the old system works, all functional aspects have been settled. Design risks have been eliminated! They can focus on…
“We just landed one of the biggest deals in our company’s history. To close the deal, we promised the customer a few things. I trust you to make it happen. Don’t worry, what they want is really basic.” This post Estimates are a Business Function, not an Engineering Function first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Bob joined the company six months ago. Bob is working hard and super excited about everything he’s getting done. He feels like he’s doing the best work of his career, cranking out tons of great stuff, going way above and beyond. It feels great and he can’t wait for his review when Gloria will recognize all his effort and contribution. Except one day, in one of their one-on-ones, Gloria gives Bob a…
I wrotes these principles down in 2015. At the time they felt "visionary". Looking back now I love these principles even more, but they seem obvious and ordinary now. This post Architecture Principles first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
“Companies that make software must have the freedom to innovate, but they must also be held liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care they owe consumers, businesses, or critical infrastructure providers. Responsibility must be placed on the stakeholders most capable of taking action to prevent bad outcomes, not on the end-users that often bear the consequences of insecure software…”…
When an engineer designs a bridge, they begin with the load the bridge is intended to bear, and they calculate the various stresses caused by wind, earthquakes, etc. They then apply a safety factor to the calculations. Engineering software is nothing like this. This post Engineering Software is Nothing Like Engineering a Bridge first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
What are the differences between a committee and a working group? Working groups relax hierarchy to allow people to solve problems across organizational units, whereas committees both reflect and reinforce organizational boundaries and hierarchies. This post Committees vs. Working Groups first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
The big news in 2022 has been the rise of “generative” AI models. Generative models generate things: text, code, images, and even music! What is a fun example of how we can use a generative AI model? Let's use AI to analyze your dreams! This post Analyze Your Dreams using AI first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Jeff Bezos: I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That’s a very interesting question. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. This post What's Not Going To Change first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Anyone who has ever been responsible for supporting production systems learns many valuable things along the way. For example... This post Lessons We All Learn first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
In late 2021 Facebook rebranded itself Meta, reorganizing around a single concept: the metaverse. Over the course of 2021 Meta's Reality Labs division spent $12.5 billion dollars - in a single year - building the metaverse. Why? Because the metaverse will track behavioral and biometric information at a record scale. This post Privacy is going to suck in the Metaverse first appeared on Dan Stroot's…
I recently read the book "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. One premise is that all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong, so design them to be easy to change. It is a wonderful book on complex systems, and the whole time I was reading it I was also thinking of it metaphorically as creating software. This post How Software Learns first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
The way programming is taught is usually aligned to how computers work (why variables are 16, 32 or 64 bits) and language constructs and syntax. However, the way I learned coding was not how we teach coding. I learned by building things. What motivates learning for beginners? This post Teaching Coding vs. Learning Coding first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Microservices exist because teams want to make their own choices, dislike code review or overbearing ‘architects’ above them, and to a lesser extent want to try different and newer languages. This feels good, but... This post Microservices: A Technical Solution to a People Problem? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Lately, everyone seems to want to talk about technology risk. I am not referring to cybersecurity risks, I am referring to the big operational types of risks (outside your information security program) that could cause a sizable impact to your business. As a CIO for over 20 years, I want to share what keeps me up at night... This post Risky Business first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Most company values are just a bunch of undifferentiated "nice things". Which company wouldn’t say they are about honesty, teamwork, or passion? The problem is employees can’t easily turn those words into actions. They don’t tell us how to "walk the tightrope" and balance our decisions. Why not? This post Values or Beliefs? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Paul Graham is one of the best-known VC success stories, and is a founder of Y Combinator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 2,000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. Paul has never read a business plan or a balance sheet. Why not? This post Vision and Talent or Planning? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
Bloomberg installed a framed New Yorker cartoon in every conference room in its New York headquarters that reads: “I know we didn’t accomplish anything, but that’s what meetings are for.” What ways can we use to make meetings disappear? This post Make Meetings Disappear first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog
When building a new product, we all know we should remain agile and launch something small and simple to start. Then, over time, we can make that product more functional by listening to our customers and adding more features. Unfortunately, the same process wreaks havoc when it comes to modernizing an existing system. At first, the reason why is not intuitive. In theory, the same principles should…
One of the most common mistakes I see is thinking of people as interchangeable, as if “who” doesn’t matter. Companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people to it, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. The roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the polite fiction that people are interchangeable,…