Writing
Essays
Most technology decisions are framed wrong before they are answered. These are attempts to fix the question. Written for founders, CTOs and executive teams — not as tutorials.
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The evolution of the software architect: from builder to system designer
Twenty years ago the job was to draw the diagrams. It is now to frame the decisions, and the title has not caught up. What the architect elevator leaves out is what the ride costs to keep.
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M-shaped engineering: cheap breadth is why you need more than one depth
AI collapsed the cost of access to a domain, not the cost of judgment inside it. Which makes multiple depths the only thing that lets you audit breadth you got for free.
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MD, JSON, HTML or XML: pick the format for the next reader
HTML beats Markdown for AI-generated artifacts. The argument is correct, and it is also incomplete — because the question underneath it is who has to read this next, and how many of them there are.
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AI is an architecture problem, not just a model problem
The gap between a working demo and a shipped feature is not the model. It is the data pipeline, the retry semantics, the eval harness, the cost ceiling and the fallback for when the provider has a bad day.
RSS · older notes, book summaries and assorted writing live at github.com/aelena/writings.