Custom AI vs. Off-the-Shelf: Stop Asking If, Start Asking Where
A client came to us with a clear vision: build a scheduling app for their staffing business, complete with a natural language interface so managers could describe scheduling constraints in plain English instead of wrestling with a GUI. They knew exactly what they needed custom AI for. They were wrong. Custom AI is software built […]
We’re Picking Tools for a Different Developer Now
A colleague of mine, Joe Coy, recently told me something that stuck with me. His team had chosen Maestro over Appium for mobile UI testing. The team’s reasoning made a lot of sense: Maestro was lightweight and easier to set up. By every traditional measure, it was the right call. Then they started using an […]
Treat Your AI Workflow Like You Treat Your Code
I kept having the same argument with Claude. Not a dramatic one. More like the low-grade friction of a coworker who keeps formatting the PR description wrong no matter how many times you fix it. The AI would reach for the wrong abstraction. I’d correct it. Next session, same mistake. I’d correct it again. And […]
The AI Collaboration Paradox
One of our teams at SEP has gone all-in on agentic development. I don’t mean they’re simply using AI tools heavily; I mean they’re deliberately redesigning their team processes, shared infrastructure, and ways of working around it. When I was talking to the team about their experiences, one thing kept jumping out at me: AI […]
Where AI Fatigue Actually Comes From
If you’ve spent time with agentic development, you’ve probably felt that particular flavor of mental exhaustion that hits harder than the work seems to justify. I wasn’t stuck on a hard problem. I wasn’t debugging something gnarly. I was just… keeping up. And then suddenly I wasn’t. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire: the […]
Vibe Coding Is the Purest Form of Agile (And That’s the Problem)
Vibe coding absolutely nails the values of Agile, and quietly violates the mechanisms that make Agile work. Vibe coding might be the purest form of Agile we’ve ever seen. No standups, no tickets, no backlog grooming, just chaos and bliss. It nails the Agile values: working software, responding to change, and individuals over process. The […]
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