Joshua McDonaldAug 26, 2026Everything Says Urgent, So Stop Sorting on ArrivalThe research on why the loud task wins, the prompt that scores importance without seeing the urgency markers, and what to do about the…
Joshua McDonaldAug 25, 2026A Third of Feedback Makes Performance WorseKluger and DeNisi found feedback backfiring in 38 percent of cases. The failures have two things in common: no specific action and distance…
Joshua McDonaldAug 20, 2026The Org Chart, the Tube Map, and Models That Are Wrong on PurposeAshby says a manager needs a model of their system. Every model is wrong. The London Tube map explains how both are true.
Joshua McDonaldAug 18, 2026Only Variety Can Absorb VarietyAshby’s law, the arithmetic of control, and why the manager is now the constraint
Joshua McDonaldAug 11, 2026Being Wrong in PublicNewton, Popper, the AWS Correction of Errors process, and how mistakes made in the open become the shoulders others stand on
Joshua McDonaldAug 6, 2026The cost of changing your mind depends on two things: how fast feedback arrives, and how much got…Two cases, three shaky sources, and the two things that actually decide the cost of changing your mind
Joshua McDonaldAug 2, 2026Every Improvement Made No DifferenceTheory of Constraints, the lane drop at Clarksburg, and why local wins do not add up
Joshua McDonaldJul 30, 2026Adding People Reduced OutputThe Universal Scalability Law, cache coherence, restaurant kitchens, and the size at which an organization starts working against itself
Joshua McDonaldJul 27, 2026Everything Is 90 Percent DoneLittle’s Law, Kingman’s formula, and why the sprint board is full while nothing ships.
Joshua McDonaldJul 23, 2026Amdahl’s Law for Org ChartsWhat a three-page paper from 1967 explains about two-pizza teams, monoliths, and why your calendar time refuses to shrink
Joshua McDonaldJul 16, 2026Ask Your Dashboard What It Reads When Nothing ChangedWork metrics move when you do work. Impact metrics move when the work mattered. AI made the first kind free to move, and most dashboards…
Joshua McDonaldJul 15, 2026You Can’t Compress What You Can’t GradeAdding an eval harness to TokenLens, and why it should have come before the compression work. A follow-up to “I Built a Prompt Compressor…
Joshua McDonaldJul 7, 2026Let the Expensive Model Write the InstructionsI build dcaudiotours.com, a set of self-guided walking tours for Washington DC. Thirteen themed tours, eight neighborhood walks, each one a…
Joshua McDonaldJun 28, 2026Do We Still Need the Sprint?What incremental delivery means, once the cost of an increment falls through the floor, whether the two-week cadence is still earning its…
Joshua McDonaldJun 18, 2026The Preflight Check for Distributed SystemsThe failure modes that take systems down, and where to look for each one
Joshua McDonaldJun 16, 2026What 10²⁶ Actually MeansThe number that defines a “frontier model” in US and California law, in terms of time, hardware, money, and the handful of training runs…
Joshua McDonaldJun 11, 2026Claude Skipped Idempotency Because I Never Asked. So I Made Asking Unnecessary.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…
Joshua McDonaldJun 1, 2026What a Jar of Peanut Butter Teaches About Agent Skill SecurityA jar of peanut butter passes through a dozen hands before it reaches your toast, and you trust every one of them without thinking about…
Joshua McDonaldMay 27, 2026What an Agent Skill Is, and How to Write OneIf 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…
Joshua McDonaldMay 21, 2026MCP, PlainlyA plain explanation of what MCP changes, and why role-based access is the part that gets hard.
Joshua McDonaldMay 14, 2026The Quiet Repricing of AI Coding ToolsCopilot, Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code all moved to usage-based billing inside twelve months. The driver is the same.
Joshua McDonaldMay 12, 2026Coordinating Parallel Engineering Work With ClaudeI have written before about decomposing specs against team shape, and about the specific Claude Code primitives that make the decomposition…
Joshua McDonaldMay 6, 2026Just the Road: Notes on perspective in an industry being rebuilt under our feet.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…
Joshua McDonaldApr 30, 2026Six Prompts for Reading an Engineering RoadmapWhen 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…
Joshua McDonaldApr 28, 2026Running a Small Team on a Big Project: Spec-Driven Development with Claude CodeMonday morning. Four engineers in the standup, a Q4 roadmap with fourteen features on it, a PM who already promised half of those to…
Joshua McDonaldApr 21, 2026The Prototype Got Cheap. The Product Didn’t.On the widening distance between a working prototype and a production system.
Joshua McDonaldApr 7, 2026When You Can Build Anything, How Do You Decide What to Build?Every engineering team eventually faces this question, and fifty years of business theory offer some guidance on how to answer it.
Joshua McDonaldApr 2, 2026Spec Driven Development and Managing software projects in 2026 using AI development toolsBottom Line Up Front: AI tools now generate code faster than teams can review it, and the old process of catching mistakes in pull requests…
Joshua McDonaldMar 31, 2026Building a Local AI Coding Assistant: VS Code + Ollama + Small Language ModelsWhy Build This (And Why You Probably Shouldn’t)
Joshua McDonaldMar 23, 2026Your Team Doesn’t Need Well-Rounded Engineers. It Needs a Well-Rounded Team.Most engineering managers follow a familiar routine during performance reviews. You meet with a team member, recognize some things they do…
Joshua McDonaldMar 19, 2026Purpose Is EverythingHow to Set a North Star and Then Actually Deliver on It
Joshua McDonaldMar 12, 2026The Best Engineering Leaders I’ve Seen All Have One Thing in Common: They’re Calm When Everything…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…
Joshua McDonaldMar 10, 2026How AI Dev Tools Can Turn Your Cloud Bill Into Useful InsightsYou manage a service team that owns a few services running in your organization. It’s Tuesday morning. A budget alert lands in your inbox…
Joshua McDonaldMar 4, 2026When Every Engineer Is a ManagerEvery new engineering manager experiences what I call The Backseat Driver moment. You know the feeling: someone else is driving, and you…
Joshua McDonaldFeb 26, 2026If Your Career Were a Product, Would Anyone Invest?Most people never use 1:1 meetings, running documentation, and a skills matrix until it’s too late.
Joshua McDonaldFeb 23, 2026Why Every Engineering Team Needs a Monthly Business ReviewImagine it’s the end of the quarter. Leadership is preparing the board deck, and someone asks, “What did engineering actually ship this…
Joshua McDonaldFeb 19, 2026Understanding Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) with a Baseball AnalogyStop struggling with complex tech jargon, Learn what a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is through the lens of a high stakes baseball play.
Joshua McDonaldFeb 16, 2026The Efficiency Illusion: Why Your AI Strategy is Accelerating Inefficiency, and How to Pivot to…Stop making your inefficiencies faster. Automating a broken workflow doesn’t create value; it just accumulates technical debt at machine…
Joshua McDonaldFeb 5, 2026Build Your Own AI General Contractor: A Practical Simulation Implementing Deterministic Guardrails…In my previous article, I explained why the time of the “Handyman AI”, one model trying to do everything, is over. I suggested that…
Joshua McDonaldJan 22, 2026Stop Hiring “Handyman” AI: Why Production Requires a General ContractorIf 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…
Joshua McDonaldJan 17, 2026Why Your AI Feels Slow: The “Baggage Claim” Theory of LatencyWhen Houston Airport first opened, executives faced a big problem. Passengers were upset about how long they had to wait for their bags…
Joshua McDonaldOct 16, 2025Engineering Teams in the Age of Agentic AIFor years, the default approach to building ML products that solved business problems was to establish a research-heavy organization, with…
Joshua McDonaldApr 25, 2021Three things to avoid and three things to do to foster open communication in teamsPerhaps 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…
Joshua McDonaldAug 3, 2020Money can’t buy loyalty — intrinsic and extrinsic motivationThere are two two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within. It’s something you do for the love…
Joshua McDonaldJun 29, 2020Laid Off — What to Do When You Don’t Know What to DoPractical tips for anyone looking for work
Joshua McDonaldJun 25, 2020What matters now?How to use Objectives and Key Results to narrow your focus on what matters and overcome your fear of failure.
Joshua McDonaldJan 6, 2020ComplectedI just finished reading a book that was recommended to me by a coworker. The book, titled the Unicorn Project by Gene Kim, outlines…
