Ship to Burn
Separate work that answers a customer question, work that earns revenue, and work that consumes effort without creating value.
Explore
Process
Straight-Jackets and Exoskeletons
How trust, accountability, and transparency can help an organization give people agency instead of restricting it.
Scissors, Glue, and AI
Hunter's account of replacing a paper-based workflow with software, and what it taught him about useful technology.
A Very Brief History of AI
Hunter's short account of the shift from language models and prompting to agents, context, and development harnesses.
AgentEx and Cognitive Load
An exploration of agent experience and cognitive load in AI-assisted software development.
Why Does AI Scale With Engineering Skill?
How engineering skill affects the use of AI development tools, and why the person directing the work still matters.
Local Maxima
How optimizing for an individual or a team can get in the way of better results for customers and the business.
Agentic Tasks: a Few Samples
Hunter's approach to agentic development workflows and the decisions involved in putting AI agents to work.
About Weirdness Budgets
How to decide where a company needs innovation and where boring, familiar choices leave more room for the work that matters.
On Slop: April 2026
What makes AI-generated content unhelpful, what it costs the sender and reader, and examples of the problem.