🚪 Zero Points for Integrity
Integrity is a company value. It's also the one nobody gets Bonusly points for. A story about a locked bathroom door, what I did when it wouldn't open, and why I can't follow leaders who'd rather explain than act.
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🟣 Part 4: Mauve Is the New Rose
Part 4 of the Mauve series: my company handed engineers a "how to use the AI tool" doc. Buried in the mental model — you're not coding anymore, you're managing a team. Nobody asked.
🧮 Part 3: In Bots We Trust
A teammate told me he trusts a pull request more now that it's passed his review, plus a couple of agents built to catch what he might miss. Three layers of review sounds like safety. It might just be a receipt for a problem nobody fixed.
🎯 Part 2: Ten Principles for Frontier Engineering (Now Do It To Yourself)
Leadership just published ten principles for managing AI agents well. Every one of them is just good management — the kind engineers have been asking for since long before Mauve existed.
🐑 Part 1: Who's the Shepherd When the Sheep Write the Code?
Our senior director says if Mauve isn't working for you, you're just not a power user. I've got ten unreviewed PRs, a bot that commits as me, and a question nobody wants to answer: who's actually driving?
You’re Not Batman. You Just Think You Are. 🦇
We all know the difference between a hero and a villain in the movies. So why do we stop applying that lens the second we get a title and a headcount?
Move Fast and Break Everyone
I spent 20 years building the tools that were supposed to save us. Instead, I think I helped build a circus. This is the confession part.
You're Not a User. You're a Cron Job.
Most "automated" systems aren't. They're load-bearing people wearing a workflow disguise. And AI is just the latest version of the same compromise we've been shipping for years.
They Were So Preoccupied With Whether They Could 🦖
Jeff Goldblum delivered that line in 1993 as sci-fi cautionary tale. Thirty years later it's a product roadmap — and your company isn't just running the park anymore. They're replacing the park rangers. And the engineers reviewing AI PRs aren't overseers. They're the training data.
We Regret to Inform You That the Parody Is the Reality 🤯
We're living inside a sci-fi parody that can't decide which genre it is. Robots, AI takeover, authoritarian drift, alien disclosure, and the end of expertise. It would be funny. It's not.
Annual Audits Are Absolute Agony
353K people liked a LinkedIn post about not wanting a performance review. That’s not viral content. That’s a suppressed scream. Here’s why the annual review is broken, gameable, and what it should actually be.
🪐 The Man Who Built Mars One Slice at a Time
A founder wants a civilization on Mars. He didn't build it as one project — he built it as ten, each one fundable, sellable, and provable without the other nine. Most engineers can't do that with a single sprint.
🗡️ Arise, But At What Cost
Solo Leveling made the Necromancer class change look like a cheat code. Leadership’s betting your engineering org on the same fantasy — minus the ending Sung actually got. 🗡️
Trillion-Dollar Club: A Membership Nobody Should Be Eligible For
A trillion dollars isn’t a personal achievement — it’s a system diagnostic. Here’s what the math, the homelessness data, and a circuit breaker can teach us about a government that forgot its own job.