Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, said something last week that should sound familiar to anyone who’s read this blog: “The verification is probably the single most important thing that people do not get right.” The skill in working with AI, he argued, is less about prompt engineering and more about handing […]

Years ago, listening to Horace Dediu’s podcast, I heard Bob Moesta interviewing Horace about a car he’d recently bought. Bob was walking through the purchase the way he does, when Horace mentioned something about gas mileage. Bob paused the interview. “Did you see what just happened? Horace just tried to tell me he got a […]

Years ago we built a dating app called Zazazu. At its heart was an in-app economy more complicated than anything a dating app had tried before. The original model was simple: a straightforward 1-1 currency per transaction. Then the business evolved, the way businesses do, and the founders needed something entirely different: free-to-play, a multi-tiered […]

Most teams treat change control as friction — a review step, an approval process, a gate between engineering and production. Something to get through. The goal is to ship; change control is what slows you down. This framing is backwards. Change control is not the thing that slows delivery. Uncontrolled change is the thing that […]

Joe, my co-founder here at BiTE, is not a developer. He’s a product owner — came up through project management, has excellent design taste, has run more projects than I can count over the years. But he doesn’t write code. Recently, Joe built a tool that helps him GM his Torg tabletop games. It generates […]

Most compliance programs run parallel to the systems they describe. Documentation lives in one place. The software lives in another. The two are connected by human effort — someone writes the evidence, someone reviews it, someone attests that the system does what the document says it does. This works until it doesn’t. And it usually […]

When I think about what’s served me best across nearly 30 years of building software — the technical skills, the architecture knowledge, the years of shipping products — none of it comes close to this: I learned how to explain things to people. That probably sounds underwhelming. It’s not. The Superpower Nobody Teaches You Earlier […]

Introduction So you’ve decided you want to drive development from behaviors, created with a shared understanding in a shared language among the Three Amigos (product owner/designer, developer, and tester). You will, most likely, immediately start seeing some benefits. But you’ll probably also encounter some difficulties. It’s important to understand that these difficulties are common. They […]