AI Mandates and the Erosion of Psychological Safety
AI mandates make honest feedback professionally dangerous, putting successful adoption at risk. What engineering leaders owe their teams when mandates arrive from above.
More issues
Total Cost of Ownership
Planning for the Real Cost of AI in Engineering
Treat Skills as Code
Agent skills are the most portable tool in agentic engineering. Time to give them the quality discipline they deserve.
Context Engineering for AI-Assistant Development
A four-layer approach to organizing project knowledge, tools, hooks, and skills so they work across AI coding tools without maintaining parallel configs.
Signal Check: February 20, 2026
The psychological cost of AI adoption got a name this week, along with the data to back it up. Developers are using AI tools more than ever while trusting them less, and researchers are starting to explain why the gap keeps widening.
Deep Blue
Simon Willison
Willison and the Oxide
AI-Assisted Reviews with GitHub Copilot
In my last article, I argued that engineering teams should fix the review process before scaling code generation. AI review tools won’t solve the capacity problem, but they handle what humans struggle to sustain: speed, consistency, and pattern recognition.
This is the practical follow-up. Copilot code review has added
Signal Check: February 13, 2026
This week's signal in AI and engineering
AI-assisted Code Reviews
Improve the Review Bottleneck Before Scaling Code Generation
The Critical Thinking Paradox
AI erodes the very skills needed for success
MCPs, Agents, Skills. Oh My!
Understanding the emerging ecosystem of LLM building blocks