Field Notes
Practical writing for product leaders and boutique advisors – on deciding what to build, answering the hard questions, and running a sharper practice.
806 Repositories, One Causal Design: the Speed Was Temporary, the Complexity Wasn't
A Carnegie Mellon study of 806 repositories found the AI speed gain faded within two months while the complexity it left behind kept compounding.
31% More Pull Requests Are Now Merging With No Review at All
Faros AI found 31.3% more pull requests merging with no review at all, and the incident data says that skipped gate is costing more than anyone tracked.
The EU Just Made "A Human Looked At It" a Legal Category
EU AI Act Article 50 took effect on 2 August. Its human-review carve-out quietly turns accountability into a legal category, not just good practice.
Your Agents Don't Need Better Retrieval. Retrieval Is the Problem.
Six agent memory systems recall stored facts nearly perfectly and apply them to indirect questions barely at all. The bottleneck is retrieval itself.
£2.76 Million of Engineering. 5% Reached a User.
One financial institution spent £2.76 million on engineering in a year. About 5% of it reached a user, and AI never touched the reason why.
The Atlantic Says Reading Is Ending. Your Deliverable Is a Document.
Just 12% of employees read internal communications in full. Nearly every knowledge business still ships its value as a document someone must read.
The PRD Didn't Die. It Just Stopped Being for Engineers.
Anthropic and Meta both demoted the PRD this year, and neither one killed it – because specification was never really the document's job.
$100 Billion of Consulting Value Evaporated. The Market Wasn't Wrong.
Accenture and Cognizant have shed a combined $100 billion in market value. What investors repriced isn't advice – it's advice delivered as headcount.
AI Helps Weak Teams 4x More Than Strong Ones. That's Not a Win.
AI cut lead time nearly 50% for low-performing teams and 10–15% for elite ones. That gap isn't the good news everyone is reading it as.