Engineering•
Architecture without phases is just a diagram
The target architecture was usually clear. The route there rarely accounted for the team doing the work.
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Essays, observations, and field notes from Nicklas K. Frank.
Engineering•
AI coding advice is rediscovering the Agile Manifesto
AI coding advice is rediscovering an old lesson: clear code, visible architecture, and useful tests beat another page of instructions.
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What AI coding taught me about micromanagement
We spent years complaining about micromanagers, then gave AI the same over-specified briefs and bloated documentation.
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Micro-frontends won't fix your monolith
A tangled frontend can make every change expensive. Splitting the deployment may only move the coordination work somewhere else.
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AI coding is a trust problem
AI taught me to ask how a confident claim was checked. The same question exposes weak feedback loops in teams and leadership.
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Developers aren't being replaced, but coding might be
AI changed my workflow before it changed my job: the tool no longer gets to decide when the work is done.
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The architect's job is to be wrong first
My team rebuilt the architecture I proposed. I now judge that first sketch by how easily they could challenge and improve it.
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Service architecture is deliberate debt
At my first job, we split an unwieldy monolith into services. The extra complexity was deliberate, and it gave the team room to learn.
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Technical debt is a tool
I used to treat technical debt like a failure. Thinking in interest rates gave me a more useful way to judge it.
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A story should be able to ship on its own
A backlog can look orderly and still leave every task waiting on another. Vertical slices give the team something it can actually ship.
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