Adding agentic harnesses to a codebase
Adding tooling to help AI ship well, why gating on coverage alone backfired into gamed tests, and why the fix looks like the platform work I used to do for teams.
Luke Swithenbank
Notes from an Australian engineering leader. Things I'm building, teams I'm leading, habits I'm creating, and hobbies I enjoy.
Latest posts
Where Software is Going
AI made generating code cheap. The disciplines that used to be optional, the harness and knowing what good looks like, are now the whole game.
How I am becoming Antifragile
How Nassim Taleb's Antifragile changed the way I think about money and risk, and the barbell strategy I'm now applying to everything from the car I bought to the way I invest.
Finding my values
How I used Claude to find my values, why naming them gave me permission to stop caring about everything, and the site I built so you can do the same.
How AI helped me give a better talk
How I used Claude to structure a talk around Patrick Winston's 'How to Speak', and why the method, not the model, is what made it land.
Why I dropped PRDs for ShapeUp
Why I dropped spec-driven development for ShapeUp, and how splitting decision clarity in two changed how we ship.
How I use Sunsama to manage my time
How I landed on Sunsama after Claude and Morgen didn't stick, and why the daily plan and shutdown ritual mattered more than the tool.
How I approached Showing Your Work
How I used AI to actually apply a book to my life, and the public posture that fell out of it.
Designing Teams for Effective Software Delivery
The four fundamental team types from Team Topologies, stream-aligned, enabling, complicated-subsystem, and platform, and how to design team boundaries deliberately instead of reactively.
How Teams Communicate and Interact
The three modes of team interaction from Team Topologies, collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating, and the anti-patterns that emerge when team interactions aren't consciously designed.
Understanding the Constitution of Knowledge
A summary of Jonathan Rauch's case for the reality-based community, the norms that keep truth-seeking honest, and why epistemic chaos is the modern threat.
Why Teams Matter Over Individuals
Why team structure and dynamics matter more than individual brilliance, and how small, stable, long-lived teams with clear ownership produce better software.
Infrastructure as an Enabler, Not a Differentiator
Infrastructure should support innovation, not be it. The case for boring technology, vendor-supported solutions, and protecting the innovation budget for customer-facing work.
Rethinking Continuous Delivery
Why centring the release process around a build artifact gets you speed, simplicity, and traceability, and why infrastructure delivery is a different beast that deserves its own pipeline.