AI Engineering Transformation
What Is Your AI Engineering System Optimising For?
Adoption tells a board how much AI it bought. Before you redesign engineering around agents, agree the one number the redesign has to move.
Ideas
Technology is a system,
not a collection of tools.
Essays, frameworks and research on how organisations create and deliver technology value.
AI Engineering Transformation
AI Won't Replace Your Engineering Bottleneck. It Will Move It.
Every stage you speed up with AI hands the constraint to the next one. The useful question for a CTO used to be where the bottleneck is. Now it is where it goes next, and how fast.
AI Engineering Transformation
Context Engineering Is the Wrong Altitude
The industry has renamed the practitioner's job twice—from prompt to context to harness engineering. Each rename is accurate, and each stops at the edge of the agent. The constraint has moved into who owns, funds and governs context across the organisation.
AI Engineering Transformation
The Second Absorption Gap: When Agents Outrun the Context You Can Govern
AI is putting agents into production faster than organisations can supply and govern the context those agents run on.
AI Engineering Transformation
The Absorption Gap: Why Your AI Adoption Metrics Are Lying to Your Board
AI is increasing engineering supply faster than organisations can absorb it. The real job of the CTO is shifting from making engineers faster to redesigning the system that now has to keep up with them.
Archive
Earlier work
Essays written between 2022 and 2025 within the QE Unit body of work, on quality engineering, architecture and technology leadership. Published here with their original dates.
Systemic CTO
Do Not Fix Tech Debt. Fix the System That Creates It
Architecture debt, incentives, team boundaries and skills concentration.
Data & AI
A Technology Leader's Playbook for AI-Powered Test Intelligence
Turning verification data into a decision system rather than a reporting exercise.
Systemic CTO
The Architecture Landscapes That Make or Break a CTO
Value streams, ownership boundaries and data interfaces: the grey areas that decide outcomes.
Technology Leadership
Three Inventories to Take Control as a CTO
People, applications and roadmap: the few things a technology executive can actually control.
Quality Engineering
7 Signs You Need a Systemic Approach to Software Production
The indicators that the production system, not the teams, is the constraint.
Enterprise Architecture
Accelerate Monolith Deployments Without Microservices
From three months to three days on a business-critical legacy system.
Quality Engineering
MAMOS: Architecting the Software Production System for Quality at Speed
A capability map of methods, architecture, management, organization and skills.
Quality Engineering
Quality Engineered, Speed Delivered
Why quality practices alone slow you down, and what changes when you treat production as a system.
Enterprise Architecture
Microservices or Monolith: The Scale That Justifies the Complexity
The evolution path from monolith to modular monolith to services, and when it stops there.
Enterprise Architecture
The Microservices Adoption Roadmap: Nine Things to Assess First
A step-by-step assessment of business, methods, architecture, engineering, technology, management and skills.
Enterprise Architecture
The Vision, Structure and Organization of a Digital Platform
Three architecture practices that give a moving platform stable points of construction.
Enterprise Architecture
How Google Does Monorepo: The Absorption System Built a Decade Before AI Agents
Google's repository is more than a source-control choice. It is an early absorption system for machine-generated change at scale.