Posts connected by the alignment tag.
4 posts
I am a good directly responsible individual in an emergency, and I do well against a reasonable deadline. That does not mean I want to live there. Manual toil is shoveling fertilizer: someone has to do it sometimes, it should rotate, and once it passes half the job you stop building. The way out is to build the machine that does the shoveling, and the hardest pile is the one that arrives from another team's pipeline.
Start with the code works for the software engineering circle of the Venn diagram, but a technical program manager naturally starts from the why, not the code. Once agents act like subordinates, the person steering them sits in the overlap and needs two documents: a Why doc facing outward toward the problem and stakeholders, and a How doc facing inward toward the agent's technical direction.
Configuration earned its place next to code: versioned, reviewed, owned. The corpus of context that aligns a team (design docs, contextual documents, the why behind the system) deserves the same standard. It's the operating system humans run on, and now the grounding agents read to understand how we work.
The Objective Function sits above all operational cycles and defines what success means. Through Search, Drive, and Renew, it ensures humans and agents continuously align on what 'better' looks like, what each can control, and whether they're still optimizing for the right thing.