Ideas, stories, and essays worth your time.https://fettink.com/en-ushttps://fettink.com/articles/everything-says-urgent-so-stop-sorting-on-arrival-1eb510be72/https://fettink.com/articles/everything-says-urgent-so-stop-sorting-on-arrival-1eb510be72/The research on why the loud task wins, the prompt that scores importance without seeing the urgency markers, and what to do about the…Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:03:14 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/a-third-of-feedback-makes-performance-worse-dfcce7b625/https://fettink.com/articles/a-third-of-feedback-makes-performance-worse-dfcce7b625/Kluger and DeNisi found feedback backfiring in 38 percent of cases. The failures have two things in common: no specific action and distance…Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:26:38 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-org-chart-the-tube-map-and-models-that-are-wrong-on-purpose-bf0058797a/https://fettink.com/articles/the-org-chart-the-tube-map-and-models-that-are-wrong-on-purpose-bf0058797a/Ashby says a manager needs a model of their system. Every model is wrong. The London Tube map explains how both are true.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:47:16 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/only-variety-can-absorb-variety-be44774911/https://fettink.com/articles/only-variety-can-absorb-variety-be44774911/Ashby’s law, the arithmetic of control, and why the manager is now the constraintTue, 18 Aug 2026 12:06:24 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/ai-made-writing-code-nearly-free-reviewing-it-got-91-percent-slower-d9fcc7838a/https://fettink.com/articles/ai-made-writing-code-nearly-free-reviewing-it-got-91-percent-slower-d9fcc7838a/Two and a half years of AI coding, as told by the industry’s own numbers, biases includedThu, 13 Aug 2026 10:41:25 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/being-wrong-in-public-ad28b73efd/https://fettink.com/articles/being-wrong-in-public-ad28b73efd/Newton, Popper, the AWS Correction of Errors process, and how mistakes made in the open become the shoulders others stand onTue, 11 Aug 2026 10:06:03 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-cost-of-changing-your-mind-depends-on-two-things-how-fast-feedback-arrives-and-how-much-got-1b92d5fa79/https://fettink.com/articles/the-cost-of-changing-your-mind-depends-on-two-things-how-fast-feedback-arrives-and-how-much-got-1b92d5fa79/Two cases, three shaky sources, and the two things that actually decide the cost of changing your mindThu, 06 Aug 2026 10:21:42 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/every-improvement-made-no-difference-57b55d5457/https://fettink.com/articles/every-improvement-made-no-difference-57b55d5457/Theory of Constraints, the lane drop at Clarksburg, and why local wins do not add upSun, 02 Aug 2026 12:30:52 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/adding-people-reduced-output-530901ec19/https://fettink.com/articles/adding-people-reduced-output-530901ec19/The Universal Scalability Law, cache coherence, restaurant kitchens, and the size at which an organization starts working against itselfThu, 30 Jul 2026 10:25:24 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/everything-is-90-percent-done-c5ed0265a6/https://fettink.com/articles/everything-is-90-percent-done-c5ed0265a6/Little’s Law, Kingman’s formula, and why the sprint board is full while nothing ships.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:17:05 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/amdahl-s-law-for-org-charts-7f6f3d1da2/https://fettink.com/articles/amdahl-s-law-for-org-charts-7f6f3d1da2/What a three-page paper from 1967 explains about two-pizza teams, monoliths, and why your calendar time refuses to shrinkThu, 23 Jul 2026 00:32:43 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-open-weight-actually-means-49250c2936/https://fettink.com/articles/what-open-weight-actually-means-49250c2936/A plain explanation of the version of AI you can download, keep, and run without asking anyone.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:43:49 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/ask-your-dashboard-what-it-reads-when-nothing-changed-dd01057064/https://fettink.com/articles/ask-your-dashboard-what-it-reads-when-nothing-changed-dd01057064/Work metrics move when you do work. Impact metrics move when the work mattered. AI made the first kind free to move, and most dashboards…Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:04:22 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/you-can-t-compress-what-you-can-t-grade-025ffcb427/https://fettink.com/articles/you-can-t-compress-what-you-can-t-grade-025ffcb427/Adding an eval harness to TokenLens, and why it should have come before the compression work. A follow-up to “I Built a Prompt Compressor…Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:56:51 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/i-built-a-prompt-compressor-the-most-useful-thing-it-found-was-nothing-a7f74c1afb/https://fettink.com/articles/i-built-a-prompt-compressor-the-most-useful-thing-it-found-was-nothing-a7f74c1afb/We’ve always compressed data to save time and money. What’s new isn’t the instinct. It’s that the codec is now a language model. That arc…Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:06:49 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/you-do-need-pronunciation-files-across-the-languages-account-for-speed-variances-but-you-should-b529063eb1/https://fettink.com/articles/you-do-need-pronunciation-files-across-the-languages-account-for-speed-variances-but-you-should-b529063eb1/You do need pronunciation files across the languages, account for speed variances - but you should… You do need pronunciation files across the languages, account for speed variances - but you should use a base file and tWed, 08 Jul 2026 09:52:27 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/let-the-expensive-model-write-the-instructions-1adbc01658/https://fettink.com/articles/let-the-expensive-model-write-the-instructions-1adbc01658/I build dcaudiotours.com, a set of self-guided walking tours for Washington DC. Thirteen themed tours, eight neighborhood walks, each one a…Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:01:27 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/who-reviews-the-reasoning-4ffb621284/https://fettink.com/articles/who-reviews-the-reasoning-4ffb621284/The code coming out of agents runs, and the reviewers shipping today catch the bugs. Nobody is reviewing the decision: was this the right…Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:15:25 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/do-we-still-need-the-sprint-931b38aa90/https://fettink.com/articles/do-we-still-need-the-sprint-931b38aa90/What incremental delivery means, once the cost of an increment falls through the floor, whether the two-week cadence is still earning its…Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:09:41 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-preflight-check-for-distributed-systems-f35be51285/https://fettink.com/articles/the-preflight-check-for-distributed-systems-f35be51285/The failure modes that take systems down, and where to look for each oneThu, 18 Jun 2026 11:54:41 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-1026-actually-means-45b8dfd62e/https://fettink.com/articles/what-1026-actually-means-45b8dfd62e/The number that defines a “frontier model” in US and California law, in terms of time, hardware, money, and the handful of training runs…Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:35:11 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/how-an-export-control-rule-reaches-an-ai-model-running-in-a-us-data-center-d2c666536b/https://fettink.com/articles/how-an-export-control-rule-reaches-an-ai-model-running-in-a-us-data-center-d2c666536b/What the directive on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 says, how deemed-export law works, and the 1991 precedent. Sourced to primary documents.Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:06:09 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/claude-skipped-idempotency-because-i-never-asked-so-i-made-asking-unnecessary-b7afa142c8/https://fettink.com/articles/claude-skipped-idempotency-because-i-never-asked-so-i-made-asking-unnecessary-b7afa142c8/The code broke on a retry I never mentioned, and even when I ask for the fix, the first version is usually the wrong shape. The answer was…Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:44:33 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/why-system-design-matters-more-as-ai-makes-building-faster-f8dfc9e0fe/https://fettink.com/articles/why-system-design-matters-more-as-ai-makes-building-faster-f8dfc9e0fe/What AI still can’t reason about no matter how well you prompt it.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:10:56 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/robots-txt-told-crawlers-where-to-stop-llms-txt-tells-agents-where-to-go-fb3194a18d/https://fettink.com/articles/robots-txt-told-crawlers-where-to-stop-llms-txt-tells-agents-where-to-go-fb3194a18d/What the file does, how to write one, and why retrieval is the part that actually matters.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:00:51 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-a-jar-of-peanut-butter-teaches-about-agent-skill-security-2d7c8a6071/https://fettink.com/articles/what-a-jar-of-peanut-butter-teaches-about-agent-skill-security-2d7c8a6071/A jar of peanut butter passes through a dozen hands before it reaches your toast, and you trust every one of them without thinking about…Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:16:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-an-agent-skill-is-and-how-to-write-one-37cec4d644/https://fettink.com/articles/what-an-agent-skill-is-and-how-to-write-one-37cec4d644/If you use an AI assistant for the same kind of task more than a few times, you have probably noticed the tax. Every session starts cold…Wed, 27 May 2026 12:01:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/ears-fifteen-years-on-the-requirements-format-built-for-the-agent-era-0f78f8ff35/https://fettink.com/articles/ears-fifteen-years-on-the-requirements-format-built-for-the-agent-era-0f78f8ff35/In 2009, Alistair Mavin sat with the airworthiness regulations for a Rolls-Royce jet engine control system and found something quietly…Mon, 25 May 2026 16:09:25 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/mcp-plainly-6e2b349689/https://fettink.com/articles/mcp-plainly-6e2b349689/A plain explanation of what MCP changes, and why role-based access is the part that gets hard.Thu, 21 May 2026 11:00:34 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/teaching-probability-through-soccer-built-with-claude-code-e9f0084879/https://fettink.com/articles/teaching-probability-through-soccer-built-with-claude-code-e9f0084879/A statistics site for middle and high school students, built around the math pro analysts actually use.Tue, 19 May 2026 12:10:13 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-quiet-repricing-of-ai-coding-tools-afc90d427a/https://fettink.com/articles/the-quiet-repricing-of-ai-coding-tools-afc90d427a/Copilot, Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code all moved to usage-based billing inside twelve months. The driver is the same.Thu, 14 May 2026 11:14:50 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/coordinating-parallel-engineering-work-with-claude-957313938a/https://fettink.com/articles/coordinating-parallel-engineering-work-with-claude-957313938a/I have written before about decomposing specs against team shape, and about the specific Claude Code primitives that make the decomposition…Tue, 12 May 2026 11:05:48 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/just-the-road-notes-on-perspective-in-an-industry-being-rebuilt-under-our-feet-8809dff3c2/https://fettink.com/articles/just-the-road-notes-on-perspective-in-an-industry-being-rebuilt-under-our-feet-8809dff3c2/My dad lives in southern Alabama near the ocean and I stay a few miles away near a beautiful community set on a golf course. I go every…Wed, 06 May 2026 11:40:51 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-little-blue-menu-and-what-it-already-knows-about-ai-10d4513875/https://fettink.com/articles/the-little-blue-menu-and-what-it-already-knows-about-ai-10d4513875/There’s a Chick-fil-A in College Park, Maryland, that doesn’t look like a Chick-fil-A. They painted it blue instead of red. The menu…Tue, 05 May 2026 01:24:46 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/six-prompts-for-reading-an-engineering-roadmap-bf4a123a5c/https://fettink.com/articles/six-prompts-for-reading-an-engineering-roadmap-bf4a123a5c/When you need to come up to speed quickly on a project, a team, or some piece of work, you can have Claude analyze the documents and ask…Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:21:51 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/running-a-small-team-on-a-big-project-spec-driven-development-with-claude-code-9a1b97f585/https://fettink.com/articles/running-a-small-team-on-a-big-project-spec-driven-development-with-claude-code-9a1b97f585/Monday morning. Four engineers in the standup, a Q4 roadmap with fourteen features on it, a PM who already promised half of those to…Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:46:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/i-used-ai-to-audit-7-200-hospital-price-files-it-found-something-the-code-missed-9baab77949/https://fettink.com/articles/i-used-ai-to-audit-7-200-hospital-price-files-it-found-something-the-code-missed-9baab77949/The story of a real data quality bug, how it got caught, and what it means for data engineering.Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:23:47 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-prototype-got-cheap-the-product-didn-t-3fc9841fa7/https://fettink.com/articles/the-prototype-got-cheap-the-product-didn-t-3fc9841fa7/On the widening distance between a working prototype and a production system.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:59:04 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/a-spring-break-commute-five-dollars-and-the-state-of-multilingual-text-to-speech-82bcb8bfa1/https://fettink.com/articles/a-spring-break-commute-five-dollars-and-the-state-of-multilingual-text-to-speech-82bcb8bfa1/Most people’s mental model of AI stops at the chat window. Type a question, get an answer, move on. That framing made sense in 2023 when a…Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:17:48 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/you-don-t-have-to-write-code-to-need-a-claude-md-58d1aeacaf/https://fettink.com/articles/you-don-t-have-to-write-code-to-need-a-claude-md-58d1aeacaf/Setting Up Claude’s Memory for Writers, PMs, Researchers, and Everyone ElseMon, 13 Apr 2026 17:56:53 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/day-1-4da9aff0dc/https://fettink.com/articles/day-1-4da9aff0dc/The First MorningThu, 09 Apr 2026 09:46:29 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/when-you-can-build-anything-how-do-you-decide-what-to-build-3e13863629/https://fettink.com/articles/when-you-can-build-anything-how-do-you-decide-what-to-build-3e13863629/Every engineering team eventually faces this question, and fifty years of business theory offer some guidance on how to answer it.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:44:47 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/spec-driven-development-and-managing-software-projects-in-2026-using-ai-development-tools-dbce2680f6/https://fettink.com/articles/spec-driven-development-and-managing-software-projects-in-2026-using-ai-development-tools-dbce2680f6/Bottom Line Up Front: AI tools now generate code faster than teams can review it, and the old process of catching mistakes in pull requests…Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:28:54 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/building-a-local-ai-coding-assistant-vs-code-ollama-small-language-models-5b548ff778/https://fettink.com/articles/building-a-local-ai-coding-assistant-vs-code-ollama-small-language-models-5b548ff778/Why Build This (And Why You Probably Shouldn’t)Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:56:31 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/nudge-theory-revisited-writing-tickets-for-humans-and-machines-1c8fd69a1a/https://fettink.com/articles/nudge-theory-revisited-writing-tickets-for-humans-and-machines-1c8fd69a1a/Using ideas from behavioral economics to improve ticket writing, especially now that large language models are reading your tickets as…Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:52:15 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/your-team-doesn-t-need-well-rounded-engineers-it-needs-a-well-rounded-team-8c1add5eb3/https://fettink.com/articles/your-team-doesn-t-need-well-rounded-engineers-it-needs-a-well-rounded-team-8c1add5eb3/Most engineering managers follow a familiar routine during performance reviews. You meet with a team member, recognize some things they do…Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:01:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/purpose-is-everything-99068c06a8/https://fettink.com/articles/purpose-is-everything-99068c06a8/How to Set a North Star and Then Actually Deliver on ItThu, 19 Mar 2026 11:59:16 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/i-built-a-dc-transit-companion-with-ai-on-my-commute-using-my-iphone-here-s-what-i-learned-46b0248bd5/https://fettink.com/articles/i-built-a-dc-transit-companion-with-ai-on-my-commute-using-my-iphone-here-s-what-i-learned-46b0248bd5/I built a DC Metro companion app called “What’s Up Metro DC” in nine days, using only my iPhone during my commute from Shady Grove to…Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:27:09 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-best-engineering-leaders-i-ve-seen-all-have-one-thing-in-common-they-re-calm-when-everything-94cc31f640/https://fettink.com/articles/the-best-engineering-leaders-i-ve-seen-all-have-one-thing-in-common-they-re-calm-when-everything-94cc31f640/There’s a moment in every engineer’s career when the pager goes off, and the world feels like it’s ending. The dashboard is a wall of red…Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:52:14 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/how-ai-dev-tools-can-turn-your-cloud-bill-into-useful-insights-7ca067c45c/https://fettink.com/articles/how-ai-dev-tools-can-turn-your-cloud-bill-into-useful-insights-7ca067c45c/You manage a service team that owns a few services running in your organization. It’s Tuesday morning. A budget alert lands in your inbox…Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:44:27 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/when-every-engineer-is-a-manager-f9a0a9fdf7/https://fettink.com/articles/when-every-engineer-is-a-manager-f9a0a9fdf7/Every new engineering manager experiences what I call The Backseat Driver moment. You know the feeling: someone else is driving, and you…Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:09:21 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/n-n-1-2-ee884a4d5f/https://fettink.com/articles/n-n-1-2-ee884a4d5f/Why Your Team Is Drowning in Conversation and How Math Explains EverythingMon, 02 Mar 2026 12:50:18 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/if-your-career-were-a-product-would-anyone-invest-b68fe89507/https://fettink.com/articles/if-your-career-were-a-product-would-anyone-invest-b68fe89507/Most people never use 1:1 meetings, running documentation, and a skills matrix until it’s too late.Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:31:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/why-every-engineering-team-needs-a-monthly-business-review-e8298b2952/https://fettink.com/articles/why-every-engineering-team-needs-a-monthly-business-review-e8298b2952/Imagine it’s the end of the quarter. Leadership is preparing the board deck, and someone asks, “What did engineering actually ship this…Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:52:20 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/understanding-directed-acyclic-graphs-dags-with-a-baseball-analogy-2206de0539/https://fettink.com/articles/understanding-directed-acyclic-graphs-dags-with-a-baseball-analogy-2206de0539/Stop struggling with complex tech jargon, Learn what a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is through the lens of a high stakes baseball play.Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:36:03 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/the-efficiency-illusion-why-your-ai-strategy-is-accelerating-inefficiency-and-how-to-pivot-to-943a4ad959/https://fettink.com/articles/the-efficiency-illusion-why-your-ai-strategy-is-accelerating-inefficiency-and-how-to-pivot-to-943a4ad959/Stop making your inefficiencies faster. Automating a broken workflow doesn’t create value; it just accumulates technical debt at machine…Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:46:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-a-15th-century-lawsuit-and-a-lead-letter-a-can-teach-us-about-the-age-of-ai-05108c0516/https://fettink.com/articles/what-a-15th-century-lawsuit-and-a-lead-letter-a-can-teach-us-about-the-age-of-ai-05108c0516/The revolution of the 15th century wasn’t defined by the scent of old paper or libraries. Instead, it was shaped by the strong, industrial…Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:57:48 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/build-your-own-ai-general-contractor-a-practical-simulation-implementing-deterministic-guardrails-5003b539c3/https://fettink.com/articles/build-your-own-ai-general-contractor-a-practical-simulation-implementing-deterministic-guardrails-5003b539c3/In my previous article, I explained why the time of the “Handyman AI”, one model trying to do everything, is over. I suggested that…Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:30:52 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/stop-hiring-handyman-ai-why-production-requires-a-general-contractor-aa6497e93e/https://fettink.com/articles/stop-hiring-handyman-ai-why-production-requires-a-general-contractor-aa6497e93e/If you want to go from basic prototypes to systems that work at scale, you need more than better prompts. You also need a new way to…Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:31:21 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-the-longest-escalator-in-the-western-hemisphere-teaches-us-about-ai-15728c99ca/https://fettink.com/articles/what-the-longest-escalator-in-the-western-hemisphere-teaches-us-about-ai-15728c99ca/If you live in the DC area, you know about the Wheaton Metro station. It’s home to the longest single-span escalator in the Western…Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:31:12 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/why-your-ai-sounds-like-a-corporate-hr-department-and-how-to-fix-it-b15f85825e/https://fettink.com/articles/why-your-ai-sounds-like-a-corporate-hr-department-and-how-to-fix-it-b15f85825e/Note: This is an excerpt from my new book, THE ART OF WHISPERING TO MACHINES, available now on Amazon.Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:53:19 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/why-your-ai-feels-slow-the-baggage-claim-theory-of-latency-2625605d41/https://fettink.com/articles/why-your-ai-feels-slow-the-baggage-claim-theory-of-latency-2625605d41/When Houston Airport first opened, executives faced a big problem. Passengers were upset about how long they had to wait for their bags…Sat, 17 Jan 2026 12:37:04 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/why-ai-forgot-your-name-the-vanishing-whiteboard-theory-fb80f2b1f8/https://fettink.com/articles/why-ai-forgot-your-name-the-vanishing-whiteboard-theory-fb80f2b1f8/AI doesn’t have a brain. It has a sliding window. Here is how to stop it from losing your data.Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:47:26 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/how-to-stop-ai-hallucinations-by-teaching-it-to-say-i-don-t-know-d31b8455b4/https://fettink.com/articles/how-to-stop-ai-hallucinations-by-teaching-it-to-say-i-don-t-know-d31b8455b4/Your AI isn’t lying to deceive you. It’s lying to please you. Here is the engineering fix.Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:36:51 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/why-most-ai-models-can-t-count-the-letter-r-in-strawberry-50f3e6ad20/https://fettink.com/articles/why-most-ai-models-can-t-count-the-letter-r-in-strawberry-50f3e6ad20/A non-technical guide to Tokenization: why AI fails at simple math and spelling.Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:51:31 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/stop-treating-ai-like-a-brain-treat-it-like-a-stadium-e0c17244fd/https://fettink.com/articles/stop-treating-ai-like-a-brain-treat-it-like-a-stadium-e0c17244fd/Why your prompts are failing and the single mental shift that fixes them.Tue, 13 Jan 2026 13:04:50 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-a-trip-to-the-supermarket-can-teach-you-about-writing-security-tickets-that-engineers-actually-a9ca917542/https://fettink.com/articles/what-a-trip-to-the-supermarket-can-teach-you-about-writing-security-tickets-that-engineers-actually-a9ca917542/This is a story about connecting threads and combining ideas from different experiences, as much as it is about engineering, security, or…Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:05:27 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/engineering-teams-in-the-age-of-agentic-ai-4ac6271d17/https://fettink.com/articles/engineering-teams-in-the-age-of-agentic-ai-4ac6271d17/For years, the default approach to building ML products that solved business problems was to establish a research-heavy organization, with…Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:00:04 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/reading-list/https://fettink.com/articles/reading-list/Reading listTue, 22 Jun 2021 03:00:15 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/crockpot-pumpkin-and-chorizo-chili-630b792804/https://fettink.com/articles/crockpot-pumpkin-and-chorizo-chili-630b792804/This easy to make slow cooker chili combines the spices of India and Mexico to create a truly unique taste.Fri, 14 May 2021 15:52:49 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/three-things-to-avoid-and-three-things-to-do-to-foster-open-communication-in-teams-2d7c10dc84/https://fettink.com/articles/three-things-to-avoid-and-three-things-to-do-to-foster-open-communication-in-teams-2d7c10dc84/Perhaps the most important thing you can learn to be both a more effective team member and leader is to learn the art of asking questions…Sun, 25 Apr 2021 02:45:52 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/on-testing-software-8a92883acd/https://fettink.com/articles/on-testing-software-8a92883acd/I’ve taught some college courses and have always been asked to provide a teaching philosophy as a guide to both students, but also the…Mon, 19 Apr 2021 03:05:24 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/money-can-t-buy-loyalty-intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation-94fe0db275/https://fettink.com/articles/money-can-t-buy-loyalty-intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation-94fe0db275/There are two two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within. It’s something you do for the love…Mon, 03 Aug 2020 20:12:00 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/laid-off-what-to-do-when-you-don-t-know-what-to-do-5e752cfaa1/https://fettink.com/articles/laid-off-what-to-do-when-you-don-t-know-what-to-do-5e752cfaa1/Practical tips for anyone looking for workMon, 29 Jun 2020 03:51:59 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/what-matters-now-2c54443318/https://fettink.com/articles/what-matters-now-2c54443318/How to use Objectives and Key Results to narrow your focus on what matters and overcome your fear of failure.Thu, 25 Jun 2020 23:26:06 GMTJoshua McDonaldhttps://fettink.com/articles/complected-aba218c355/https://fettink.com/articles/complected-aba218c355/I just finished reading a book that was recommended to me by a coworker. The book, titled the Unicorn Project by Gene Kim, outlines…Mon, 06 Jan 2020 22:52:56 GMTJoshua McDonald