More sales only treads water if you can’t hold on to the customers you already have. I’m working with an independent insurance agency right now, and their real growth problem isn’t acquisition. It’s retention. Renewals compound. Lose the customer and that stream just stops. They spent real time and money winning that person. Losing them to a forgotten email is the expensive kind of churn - the kind where nobody decided to lose them. ...
The AI revolution is bringing out the extremes in both camps. I’ve seen it play out personally at work. Fear and giddy excitement are present in equal portion, driving employees’ daily decisions around AI adoption. Both reactions are dangerous for different reasons, but I want to focus on fear in this post for one simple reason: fear is what slams the door shut on AI adoption. AI usage mandates won’t fix fear. Your employees will stop at compliance; what you need is transformation. Replacing uncooperative employees doesn’t fix it either; the fear becomes infectious, spreading through the rest of the organization. CEOs aren’t immune to the fear either. The saying I have heard from our own CEO this year is “every day you’re late to AI is 2 days you fall behind”. ...
What is the act of programming? My team and I went back to first principles earlier this year. And I went back to the old masters: Brooks, Naur, Djikstra. I was seeking to re-learn the essence of Software Engineering from those who had thought about the problem in the beginning. If the act of programming is no longer typing symbols into computer code, then what is it? I think Naur has a great definition in his paper, “Programming as Theory Building”. ...
Scrum is broken. I thought I knew what Agile looked like. 2-week sprints, story points, daily standups. I ran that cadence at my last job. But something changed with Opus 4.7. Now, once we’ve groomed the cards and defined the sprint, everything is done within a day. Doesn’t matter how many cards we throw into a sprint, we just fire up more parallel agents. ...
The Problem I’m Trying to Solve I’ve been coding with AI agents for as long as they’ve been generally available, and I keep running into the same bottleneck: me. Every time Claude generates code, I need to review it. Every time it completes a feature, I need to verify it actually works. Every time it runs tests, I need to check if the failures are real bugs or hallucinations. I’m the human in the loop, and I’m slowing everything down. ...
What does it look like to build AI agents that actually empower people’s lives, not just “augment” them? For HealthShare Technology Solutions, I wanted to build an AI agent that non-technical users can actually use to take the hassle out of their health care cost sharing plan. In this post I’ll describe the guiding principles and design decisions that made Alice not just possible, but empowering to everyday users. The guiding principles I used in building Alice come down to four key words: ...