Each essay starts with one real decision or mistake, and stays with it until there's something worth passing on.
Each one is a single dispatch, one idea at a time, dated. The field guide is the maintained map they feed into.
When an agent takes over the labor, the same change lands as a win for one person and a loss for another, and the loss is now measurable. This essay looks at what decides which one a person gets, and why relocating your identity from the task itself to what survives it is what converts the loss into gain.
Read the field note →AI adoption already happened in most organizations, so the real risk moved from the people who won't start to the ones who won't wait, the sprinters. This essay argues you can't govern that fast tail with a communication plan, only by putting the practice into the substrate the agents actually run on.
Read the field note →Experts increasingly put their discernment into designing and validating the systems agents run, not into the work itself. This essay asks where the next generation of experts will develop that discernment, now that agents do the formative work people used to learn on.
Read the field note →Most sprint reviews are only demos. What the review is actually for, and how to get the real one back.
Read the field note →What a Career Delta File is, how a decade of keeping one has paid off, what the gaps cost, and why agent memory has to solve the same problem.
Read the field note →Why fluency in a framework like SAFe isn't the same as skill, what that gap costs teams, and what Shu-Ha-Ri explains about the trap of stopping there.
Read the field note →Why leaders end up surrounded only by agreement, what it costs them, and the specific habits that make it safe for someone to tell them the truth.
Read the field note →A performance review that blindsided me after years of strong ratings taught me the one rule managers should never break: no surprises, ever.
Read the field note →What a self-important first boss taught me about respect, developing people, and why performance conversations should help, not punish.
Read the field note →Why digital messages get read as attitude, and what leaders can actually control about it, now that AI drafts so many of them.
Read the field note →Why leaders need to read emotional signals fast: the case for emotional acuity at the VP level, and a practice ladder for building it.
Read the field note →Senior leaders often feel an itch to sit down one-on-one with someone well below them on the chart. This essay treats that itch as a signal pointing at a specific problem, not a meeting to schedule before you know which one.
Read the field note →A new model made every other agent Ed runs better too, and the credit belonged to the setup around them, not the model itself. This essay asks how much of the coaching craft actually transfers to agents, and where improvement still has to be built by hand.
Read the field note →None of the code here gets written by hand anymore: agents write every line, and the job left is pointing the work and judging what comes back. Comprehension debt is the gap between what a system actually is and what anyone can still account for, a debt that can be managed but never fully paid down.
Read the field note →Agents never sleep, so work in progress no longer has the natural ceiling that human labor used to put on it. This essay borrows the oldest idea in kanban, limiting work in progress, and applies it to the one constraint that never got faster: human attention.
Read the field note →Approving every move an agent makes feels responsible, until the approver becomes the bottleneck. This essay reframes human-in-the-loop as a coaching relationship, where agents earn autonomy the way people do, instead of a gate every action has to clear.
Read the field note →A leader goes quiet under bad news, and people often read that as composure. More often it's broicism: real anxiety held rather than examined, tending to leak out sideways onto whoever is standing closest.
Read the field note →An ordinary bug burned through millions of tokens in a day. The spend cap that finally stopped it was only the smoke alarm. The real fix was the sprinkler system underneath.
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