I run a fantasy football league on things get pretty heated during the season. Debates and trash talks go on daily in our GroupMe chat and the guys like to remind each other about their resume. How many wins they have, how many championships, how many times someone beat someone else, you name it. Ideally these status would be easy to check on our ESPN fantasy app, but ESPN’s platform has some shortcomings here.

As my career has progressed over the years, I’ve noticed that the challenges I deal with are less about writing the best code possible and more about creating clarity, leverage, and alignment for my teams. The work itself has shifted from solving problems directly to building systems (technical and organizational) that allow engineers to solve problems well without constant intervention.

These leadership principles are the result of that shift. They reflect how I think about engineering leadership today: how decisions get made, how teams scale, and how responsibility should be distributed as organizations grow. They aren’t hard rules per se, but operating guidelines I use to stay consistent as scope increases and complexity rises.

Ever since agents made it into the mainstream, I’ve been really interested in how they work. I’ve always wanted my own personal Jarvis, and now I feel like I have the chance to build one myself. At its score, it’s mechanics: a loop that observes input, decides what to do, acts, and repeats. At scale, things get much more complex, especially for user-facing products like ChatGPT or other AI coding assistants. What lies in between is a lot of lessons, techniques, and mechanics.