Ben Darfler @bdarfler - Tumblr Blog

When I started my first job at Amazon.com, as the first analyst in the strategic planning department, I inherited the work of producing the

Craft can be applied to anything, including the humble chart.

#chart #metrics #graph #design

Another take on the many ways to use AI. I appreciate the autonomy framing over others I've seen.

Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents: operator, collaborator, consultant, approver, and observer.

#ai #autonomy #agentic coding

From micro-manager to macro-manager: coding's asynchronous future

Another entry into our collective attempt to understand what AI is doing to software development.

"think of “conductor” versus “orchestrator” as two ends of a spectrum of AI-assisted development, with many hybrid workflows in between."

#ai #llm #llms #agentic coding

Understand the tradeoffs of team size and span of control for managers

Thank you, Jade, for dropping the post I had in my head this week. I'm not on team 50 direct reports, but post ZIRP we are certainly pushing beyond the 6-8 that felt comfortable before.

#span of control #pods #team size #org structure

Google’s Goals/Signals/Metrics (GSM) framework is a simple yet powerful tool to measure human systems. I’m surprised it remains buried in the conversation of Engineering Productivity and UX research and hasn’t expanded into areas like OKRs.

#gsm framework #goals #signals #metrics #okrs #measurement

If you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with the Locating Yourself model. I love this it because it’s disarmingly simple and paradoxi

"Acceptance reduces resistance; resistance fuels persistence." The way to move above the line more often is to accept all the times when you can't.

#conscious #above the line #below the line #acceptance

Last Thursday Honeycomb was kind enough to hand me the closing keynote slot at O11yCon, a conference whose entire premise is that observabil

"The next twenty years of observability are not going to be about prettier dashboards. They are going to be about what your trace structure says to a non-human reader at three in the morning, when you are asleep, and your agent is the only thing standing between your customers and an outage you will hear about on Monday."

#observability #ai #llms

Peter Drucker revolutionized management theory by shifting the focus from merely supervising employees to proactive strategizing for long-te

5 functions of a manager: plan, organize, integrate, measure, and develop.

#drucker #management

“We’re accumulating code faster than we are accumulating trust.” Sometimes a phrase just hits.

Some of the best teams I've been a part of have thrived because of the trust that was built through collaborative work. The more we dive into AI, the more I'm curious to see what collaborative practices emerge that we can pair with it.

#pairing #collaboration #ai

Explore push/pull communication in Agile teams. Learn to balance info flow for success. Dive in now for expert insights!

You need to think about both: "Push communication ensures clarity and direction from leadership, aligning teams with the overarching goals. … Conversely, pull communication empowers team members to proactively seek information, driving bottom-up innovation."

#communication #documentation

In eighth-grade math, getting the right answer wasn’t enough. If you couldn’t show the steps you took to get there, you didn’t get the…

We are moving from one shots to collaborative workflows.

"Explainability by design: Why AI needs to show its work in 2026"

- Principle 1: Citations are the Currency of Trust - Principle 2: Designing for the Editor State - Principle 3: The Power of ‘I Don’t Know’

#ai #collaboration #workflows

Peter Naur's 1985 theory of programming explains why experience matters more in the age of AI-generated code

Orgs serious about software quality must invest in:

Documentation that captures intent

Knowledge sharing practices that transfer mental models

Code review processes that evaluate theoretical consistency

Mentorship programs that develop theory-building skills

#ai #agentic coding #organizations #culture

Explore how generative culture boosts team performance and innovation.

I appreciated the 7 practical suggestions that ground what can be a fluffy topic: - Demonstrate Leadership Commitment and Role Modeling - Encourage and Reward Collaboration - Promote Psychological Safety - Implement Blameless Postmortems - Strive for Information Transparency and Clarity - Celebrate Innovation, experimentation - Foster Continuous Learning

#culture

A long-form article entitled: "Patterns for Reducing Friction in AI-Assisted Development"

I appreciated the set of patterns (very on brand for thoughtworks): • Knowledge Priming • Design-First Collaboration • Context Anchoring • Encoding Team Standards • Feedback Flywheel

#llms #agentic coding #agentic development

The converging best practices for building with coding agents, from OpenAI to Stripe to OpenClaw.

I appreciated the terms "attended" and "unattended" parallelism as well as this observation: "The engineer’s job … [is] splitting into two distinct halves … building the environment … [and] managing the work"

#llm #harness #agentic coding

We are shifting from generating more code to verifying more code.

#llm #coding #agentic coding

Back pressure for agents You might notice a pattern in the most successful applications of agents over the last year. Projects that are able

Nice framing for giving agents more programmatic feedback and needing less human feedback.

#feedback #back pressure #agents #llms

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