FROM
PEOPLE
WHO
BUILD.

If you have engineers on the fence about AI, don't put them on a real project to convince them. Give them their own terminal and let Claude rebuild it. The blast radius is zero and the skill transfer is real.

It's not just a name change. When you call something a performance review, you're already framing it around behavior, effort, and presence. Did you show up? Did you work hard? Are you a good culture fit? The conversation drifts toward personality before it ever reaches outcomes. When you call it an impact review, the question is different from the start: what changed because you were here?

Taking a mobile app apart used to be a craft. It took a specialist, a quiet week, and a great deal of patience. None of that is true anymore.

For two years the story has been the same: AI writes code faster, one engineer does the work of three. I ran the experiment. The typing got cheap almost overnight. What nobody warns you about is what got expensive instead.

Most of my Claude workflow was actually Claude working while I waited. Then I tried running four instances at once, each in its own Git worktree. A week in, I’m not going back. Here’s what it’s like to keep four agents in flight, and the setup that makes it work instead of collapsing into chaos.

Strategy is a set of decisions made in a room. Culture is what people do when no one is in the room. After eight years leading engineering teams, this is the lesson I keep coming back to, and the one most leaders learn too late.