We Locked Ourselves Out of Production
A few months back an engineer was setting up a build pipeline with an AI coding agent. The agent held production AWS credentials. It created a CloudFormation...
I'm Changing my Title from Head of Engineering
After 5 years as Head of Engineering at epilot, I'm switching my title to Distinguished Engineer. Vlad becomes the sole Head of Engineering. He's been...
Our Entire Company Ships Code Now. 40 PRs from Non-Engineers in 60 Days.
In February, I opened our entire codebase to the company. PMs, designers, projects, customer success, and support all got access to 219 repositories and over...
We Made Coding Agents Actually Reliable By Fixing One Thing
Last week, Vercel published research showing that giving coding agents a compact index of your documentation dramatically outperforms letting them search for...
A Product Engineer's Letter to PMs
Dear PM, Before anything else: thank you. The work you do, aligning stakeholders, maintaining a relationship with users, finding new opportunities and...
A Product Engineer's Letter to Designers
Dear Designer, I hope this letter finds you well. I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts about how we work together, and more importantly, to...
Dealing with Pushback to Product Engineering
I was recently confronted by a product engineer colleague here at epilot, frustrated with some of his non-engineer colleagues who didn't seem to buy into the...
How I Got Product Engineering Wrong
If you've seen my posts lately you've probably seen a lot of talk about Product Engineers: software engineers who talk in customer problems and take pride in...
Everything Is a Bet
Everything is a bet. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you start making smarter bets. Here's why embracing uncertainty isn't just smart—it's necessary:...
Bullshit Tech Roles (satire)
In any sufficiently well-funded or otherwise successful tech company, a set of new roles will inevitably emerge—so crucial and revered by our industry that...
