Five for Friday - May 29, 2026

Welcome to Friday! Here are 5 points worth sharing, all based on what I'm thinking about or dealing with right now:

1. Being new to a workplace means your initial impressions are useful snapshots of how the company operates. Writing those snapshots down can help identify bad patterns or processes. I wrote a 5-page assessment after 30 days that's proving to be quite useful.
2. At work, most of our user stories and bugs are either partially or fully written using AI (with human direction). At the same time, though, they've become harder to read. It's a hard feeling to pin down, but Cal Newport does it in his essay "Easy is Overrated".
3. Another challenge is when releases are sporadic throughout the week and that unpredictability causes other parts of the business to ask for changes in the release process. Alan Page's essay "The Scarcity Trap" clearly labeled a feeling I was having where scarcity of releases causes weird decisions to be made.
4. I've found it challenging to describe what things I've done to guide AI into useful behaviors. To say "I use skill files" is overly specific. Then I discovered the term: harness engineering. You build a harness around your models to help get the results you need! (Scaffolding is another term that would work.)
5. Finally, I've been pondering the future of Code Reviews. Code Reviews are a learning tool, so what happens when Code Reviews become unreadable and too plentiful? Either way, you still need to prove the code works (or doesn't).

Thanks for reading.