wickedagile

The best code tells a story. The best stories have architecture.

Most people don't build both.
Nobody told them they could.

the work →the writing →
wickedagile — session
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The Code After the Prose

● Jul 2026 · 11 min read · SOURCE medium
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01

The Code After the Prose

Jul 2026 · 11 min read
The Last Engineer to Open the IDEThe work before the work, and what watching engineers taught me about AI-native software development. Like every…The Model Is a Rounding Error. Engineer the Harness.The expensive model is not your AI strategy. It is what you are using instead of one. Most organizations are running…Agentic Readiness Is a Measure of Technical DebtWhat you cannot automate tells you what you have been hiding. For thirty years, the industry has measured technical…Developer Experience Was Never a Tooling ProblemThe portal era ends not because portals failed, but because the category was wrong. For twenty years, the developer…The Loop You Haven’t Built YetAdaptive governance generates the signals. SEI reads them. Neither one is the point. Most organizations still treat…Software Engineering Intelligence - Measure What Changed.Why green dashboards don’t equal real value in an agentic world. I got a question recently about measurement for GenAI…Process Should Adapt to the Work, Not the Other Way AroundStatic process breaks variable work. Autonomous execution just makes it break faster. I’ve spent a lifetime in…Why Prompts Become Tech DebtEnterprise AI does not usually fail because teams lack good models. It fails because they do not match the interaction…Stop Waiting for an AI Strategy. Your People Already Have One.The adoption curve already happened. Your strategy deck is late to its own meeting. While organizations design…
WORKSPACE · 7 PACKAGES · 5 DEPLOYED · ONE LOOP

experiments.

You cannot stabilize the harness — so the durable system sits around it.

wicked-crew the harness of your harnessesCONTROL PLANE
intentharnessclaude · codex · cursorrecordgardenSteerestateEquipbrainEquiptestingVerifybusFabric
wicked-gardenSteer
wg.wickedagile.comLive
Steering before execution — reads each prompt's work-shape + risk and applies the right rigor, plus the capabilities a planner-executor can't do alone.
Open ↗
wicked-interactive a different way to work with agents — describe it, watch it build, point to refinetry it ↗
Govern · the flagship

wicked-crew

The control room for governed agent delivery — drive, gate, audit; the human stays in command. The harness for your agent harnesses.

wc.wickedagile.com ↗
wicked-gardenSteerSteering before execution — reads each prompt's work-shape + risk and applies the right rigor, plus the capabilities a planner-executor can't do alone.live ↗wicked-estateEquipYour live technical environment, queryable — requirements↔implementation, blast-radius, infra + policy relationships, operational history.live ↗JSwicked-brainEquipThe learning layer — captures domain, requirements, decisions and learnings with provenance; search, challenge, correct, trace to source. What learns into estate, distinct from its code graph.repo ↗wicked-testingVerifyNo agent grades its own homework — an enforced wall between the agent that runs the tests and the one that judges them.live ↗JSwicked-busFabricThe durable nervous system beneath it all — local-first, at-least-once, replayable. The fabric the loop rides on.repo ↗wicked-interactiveSurfaceA surface beside — composes the family's building blocks; it does not close the loop. Describe it, watch it build, ship HTML/PDF/deck.live ↗
Five chapters · ~30 years

about.

One career, read top to bottom. The same problem getting clearer with every chapter.

Chapter 01 — Early Years

Lucky enough to be in the room early.

I've been building software since before the commercial internet really had a name for what we were doing. My first real job in tech was helping put travel booking online. We had built a white-label platform for a number of large companies — pulling real-time pricing from SABRE, the whole architecture. For Expedia, we got to do something different: I led a two-person team and we designed and built their version from the ground up. I had nothing to do with Expedia's success after that. I was just lucky enough to be in the room early.

Chapter 02 — Scale

The tolerance for failure got much smaller.

From there, the work moved into financial services, where the problems got more complex and the tolerance for failure got much smaller. Syndicated data products. Compliance-grade delivery. Global market launches. Clients like UBS and Singapore Exchange who expected things to work the first time.

Chapter 03 — Architecture

Was the architecture surviving contact with reality — or just looking impressive in a slide deck?

Over time, the work shifted from building products to shaping how large organizations build them. I have always tried to stay close enough to the code and delivery teams to know whether the architecture was surviving contact with reality or just looking impressive in a slide deck.

Chapter 04 — AI

Not a model problem. An organizational one.

The last several years at Accenture have been focused on AI, specifically the gap between what AI looks like in a demo and what it takes to make it work in production. That gap is wider than most people want to admit. Data is fragmented. Systems are older than the teams maintaining them. Workflows everyone agreed to automate are still held together with undocumented tribal knowledge. Getting AI to work in that environment is not just a model problem. It is an organizational one.

Chapter 05 — Reckoning

Agents just made it obvious.

I have been wrong about plenty of things over the years. I thought the hardest part of building software was writing the code. Then I thought it was the architecture. Then the process. Now I think the hard part is making an organization operable by something other than the organization itself. That problem was always there. Agents just made it obvious. I am still figuring it out, same as everyone else.