Essays on engineering leadership, AI strategy, and the un-heroic side of leading teams through the AI moment. Written from Montreal.https://herman.engineer/en-ushttps://herman.engineer/blog/conways-law-in-reverse/https://herman.engineer/blog/conways-law-in-reverse/For nearly sixty years we redrew org charts to fix rigid software. Now the software bends in days, and the org chart has quietly become the most permanent artifact in the building.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-pin-factory-and-the-poem/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-pin-factory-and-the-poem/The moment machine intelligence became scarce and metered, our industry began rebuilding the division of labour it thought it had transcended. Adam Smith's pin factory explains the new agent economy, and his forgotten fine print explains where it has to stop.Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-first-software-that-can-sell-out/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-first-software-that-can-sell-out/For thirty years, software's superpower was that the millionth copy cost nothing. In 2026, a frontier AI lab hung a sold-out sign on its door, and the economics of intelligence quietly changed shape.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/worth-doing-badly/https://herman.engineer/blog/worth-doing-badly/Machines just made competence abundant, and everything we ship now arrives looking professional. Which means the most valuable thing left to do with our own hands may be the thing we do badly.Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-field-manual-for-agentic-engineering/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-field-manual-for-agentic-engineering/OpenAI's most productive engineering team has not written a line of code in five months. They have shipped about a million lines. They just published what they learned. Here is the executive translation.Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/karpathy-sequoia-five-notes/https://herman.engineer/blog/karpathy-sequoia-five-notes/Andrej Karpathy spent thirty mostly technical minutes on the Sequoia stage describing the executive shift of the decade. Five things from it survive translation.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/why-faster-ai-doesnt-make-faster-companies/https://herman.engineer/blog/why-faster-ai-doesnt-make-faster-companies/AI got an order of magnitude faster. Your company got two or three times faster. The gap is not a mystery. It is a measurement problem.Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-great-inversion/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-great-inversion/For 25 years we built interfaces for humans. Now we are building them for agents. The web just flipped.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/building-for-the-wrong-model/https://herman.engineer/blog/building-for-the-wrong-model/Most enterprise AI investments are compensating for limitations that are about to disappear. When they do, the scaffolding becomes the problem.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/trust-but-verify/https://herman.engineer/blog/trust-but-verify/AI is confidently wrong some percentage of the time. The skill is not checking every line. It is knowing which lines to check.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/me-palace-memory-claude-code/https://herman.engineer/blog/me-palace-memory-claude-code/Leeloo learned 5,000 years of human history in ten seconds. Your AI can't remember last Tuesday. So Milla Jovovich built an open-source fix.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/say-what-you-mean/https://herman.engineer/blog/say-what-you-mean/Prompting did not die. It fragmented into four different skills. Most of us are still practicing only the first one.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-taste-gap/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-taste-gap/The most productive users of AI are the ones who are best at rejecting its output.Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/think-in-pieces/https://herman.engineer/blog/think-in-pieces/The skill is not solving the problem. It is slicing it. And it applies to far more than code.Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/what-do-you-actually-want/https://herman.engineer/blog/what-do-you-actually-want/The most expensive sentence in 2026 is not 'build this.' It is 'build... something like this, you know what I mean.'Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-new-management/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-new-management/AI agents are fast, moderately reliable, and have no sense of direction. The skill they demand most is not technical. It is managerial.Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/hitchhikers-guide-new-job-market/https://herman.engineer/blog/hitchhikers-guide-new-job-market/AI changed what we can build. It also changed what we need to know. Here are the six skills that matter now.Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/it-is-time-to-boil-the-ocean/https://herman.engineer/blog/it-is-time-to-boil-the-ocean/AI is not competition. It is rocket fuel. The question is what we finally aim at.Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-kitchen-is-open/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-kitchen-is-open/The kitchen just opened. The question is not who gets cut. It is what we finally get to cook.Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/i-know-kung-fu/https://herman.engineer/blog/i-know-kung-fu/Claude Code skills are not plugins. They are not tools. They are knowledge, uploaded at the precise moment it's needed.Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-690b-question/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-690b-question/Wall Street thinks AI infrastructure is overbuilt and AI is powerful enough to destroy $800B in SaaS market cap. Both cannot be true. The arithmetic picks a winner.Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/clawdbought/https://herman.engineer/blog/clawdbought/Two weeks ago, 147,000 stars was a signal. Now the creator of OpenClaw is inside OpenAI. The agent race just changed shape.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/when-intelligence-organizes-itself/https://herman.engineer/blog/when-intelligence-organizes-itself/AI didn't copy our org chart. It reinvented it. Three companies, working independently, arrived at the same management structure. That should change how you think about everything.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/147000-github-stars/https://herman.engineer/blog/147000-github-stars/OpenClaw isn't the future. But the demand it exposed is.Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/claude-has-character/https://herman.engineer/blog/claude-has-character/For thirty years we've known that scripts fail under pressure and principles don't. We applied this to people. We forgot to apply it to machines. Anthropic just remembered.Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/anthropic-quietly-winning/https://herman.engineer/blog/anthropic-quietly-winning/The company most obsessed with what AI should not do has become the company doing the most interesting things with it.Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/your-ide-is-a-dead-pixel/https://herman.engineer/blog/your-ide-is-a-dead-pixel/The IDE was designed for humans who write code. If agents write the code, the IDE becomes what the light table became to Disney animators.Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-ancient-art-of-knowing-less/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-ancient-art-of-knowing-less/When you create a 'QA engineer' agent, you're not loading specialized capabilities. You're asking a generalist to forget everything except what matters. The sculptor knew this. Now the engineer must learn it.Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-memento-problem/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-memento-problem/Why your AI agents need a system, not a bigger brainFri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-bookshelf-in-the-black-hole/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-bookshelf-in-the-black-hole/Why mastery is now the thing that makes you lostWed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-genius-who-cant-say-i-dont-know/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-genius-who-cant-say-i-dont-know/Gemini 3 Flash is fast, cheap, and brilliant. It also doesn't know what it doesn't know.Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/learning-fortran/https://herman.engineer/blog/learning-fortran/What Dorothy Vaughan understood about the future that most people missMon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/mcp-and-the-token-tax/https://herman.engineer/blog/mcp-and-the-token-tax/Letting your AI agents thinkMon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT