We stopped requiring peer review

Eighteen months ago, I wouldn’t have guessed we’d be removing Peer Review on pull requests. Over the last several months I’ve watched this team spend increasing effort trying to get pull requests reviewed. Not because people were avoiding reviews. Quite the opposite. They reminded each other in Slack, randomly assigned reviewers to beat the bystander effect, coordinated schedules, built skills and nudged each other throughout the day. Eventually I realized what this optimization of the review process was telling me. ...

June 26, 2026 · 2 min

It looks like it works

I build with AI every day, and I have pushed my teams to do the same. We have rolled out AI tooling across engineering, built production agents for the boring work, and I spend real time coaching engineers on how to get more out of these tools. I am not a skeptic. I think this is the biggest shift in how we build software in my career. So I want to be careful about how I say the next part, because it is not a complaint about AI. It is a warning about what AI does to us. ...

January 12, 2026 · 3 min