software engineering leader
I walked into a dying CRM rebuild welded to a legacy vendor, turned it into a real platform, and shipped a year early. Then we found out the products were solving problems nobody had, so I started fixing the problem statements myself. That fixed the products and broke everything else.
I fixed a bug in ten minutes that could've cost me hours, and felt nothing. The fix worked. The understanding never showed up. On what actually goes missing when you let the tool think first.
AI made the first version easy. Everything after that (the scaling, the edge cases, the maintenance) still takes real engineering. On growing alongside LLMs.
With AI-assisted coding, software engineers are becoming product engineers and architects, leaning into system design, collaboration, and iteration with LLMs.
An exploration and a working solution for passing secret input values into GitHub Actions manual, self-service workflows, without leaking them in the logs.
We're back. Round and round we go. Why I keep rebuilding this blog, why I keep abandoning it, and why this time I'm betting I'll actually stick with writing.
