Thoughts on agentic development, team orchestration, and shipping software with AI.
AI is going to help you ship something great: it should also prepare you for the boring side of success. Every feature shipped without traceability is a permit that didn’t get filed.
Joe Rinehart / May 25, 2026Pull the lever, check the result, pull the lever again. On the dopamine trap of AI coding tools, who benefits from keeping you in the REPL, and why slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Joe Rinehart / May 21, 2026If a chef can cook 10x faster, what happens to the rest of the restaurant? Code was never the bottleneck. Delivering working software was.
Joe Rinehart / May 18, 20261,654 merged PRs, 67% needing no finishing work at all. A typical week: ~129 PRs, each backed by a Jira spec and a post-mortem.
Joe Rinehart / May 14, 2026Cate was never just about Claude. Pick the right model for the right job — Opus for planning, Codex for review, Grok for code — one coordinated workflow, your budget envelope, your rules.
Joe Rinehart / May 11, 2026AI makes it easy to delegate not just the work, but our engagement with our work. Planning is the single most valuable thing we can do with our time. That's not an AI insight. It's a leadership insight.
Joe Rinehart / April 27, 2026Issue tracking isn't dead because the need for communication will never die. And right now, that need is growing faster than we are.
Joe Rinehart / April 13, 2026Claude and friends aren't making our jobs easier. They're changing what our jobs are. When the tweeners do the heavy lifting, the keyframes have to be right. And that's on us.
Joe Rinehart / March 23, 2026If you're using Claude Code, you've already done real work to get here. Delegation and orchestration shouldn't come at the cost of that investment, much less shipping your code off to another third party.
Joe Rinehart / March 16, 2026Every developer just became a team lead. Every manager just inherited a department. Claude didn't just change what we build. It changed the job.
Joe Rinehart / March 12, 2026Teams that ship build more than software. They build a shared body of knowledge that evolves over time: the culture, the communication, what worked, what didn't, what the customer really wanted.